The little things define us

A few years ago, I found a small box in my mail from Bill Thompson, a classmate of mine from Palouse.

Bill and I, along with 13 others, spent all 12 years together out of a class of 24.

Needless to say, we were tight, and very close friends.

I opened the box when I got home, and inside was a small agate marble, and a note. The note said, “As God is my witness, this is a marble that I got from you a long time ago when we were kids.”

When we were young, we played marbles for keeps, and I had, over the years from about 1940-42, accumulated about 1,500 of them. I seldom used my agate shooter when I played for keeps, but this time I had, and Bill won it from me.

Sometimes I guess it is the little things in life that stay with you, and in this case it was Bill’s generosity in returning my shooter.

Bill lived on a farm on the North River Road, right along the Palouse River, and came to school on a WI&M (Washington, Idaho and Montana) train. There wasn’t bus service out in his area, and a handful of students rode the small train to school and returned on the same train in late afternoon.

The train originally served a number of sawmills with logs, but now ran the mail and some deliveries, as well as a few passengers.

It ran right past where I lived.

We played a lot of marbles before school, during recess and after school. We were not supposed to play for keeps, but we did anyhow, and if someone was a poor loser, we just gave the marbles we won back to avoid any backlash from school officials.

You could play against just one person or several, and whenever your shooter struck another person’s marble you could keep it. Not too exciting nowadays, but it got us through our childhood.

I had used my agate marble as a shooter because it was smaller and harder to hit. It was about two-thirds the size of a regular marble.

I picked up the phone and called Bill to thank him for his unusual gesture, and we chatted for a long time. He said every time he looked at the darn marble it seemed to say that he should return it, so he did.

He lived in a little town down near Walla Walla, and I occasionally saw him at Palouse Days when I would go down for the celebration. He was always faithful to anything “Palouse,” but you wouldn’t understand that unless you grew up there.

He said I should give the marble to one of my grandkids, along with his note, which I plan to do.

It wasn’t long after that when I got a call from another Palouse friend who told me that Bill had fallen down his basement stairs. They thought he only had some bruises, but that evening he started to have headaches; by morning, he was gone.

It is odd that a little marble gesture can define a life, but in a way it does. He was always generous to a fault and did a lot to hold our class of 1948 together.

Bill played football and was on our school boxing team.

I guess I can say, with some certainty, that it is the little things in life that help define who we are.