Marbellous.

Yesterday, the neighbour's kid showed up on our porch while I was sleeping in the makeshift hammock with a copy of Doctor Zhivago on my chest. He had come up to me and said he had lost his marbles and would I be so kind as to help him recover them? I had smiled at the ironic connotations of his question - Lost his marbles. Haven't we all? So, I had hitched my trousers up, ruffled his hair and told him that I most assuredly would (even though history had taught me that children found me the equivalent of a doorknob - boring and irrelevant). We had looked behind hedges, beneath cars whose bonnets needed washing, and above a rusty birdbath. Subsequently, we had found the rogue marbles perched precariously on the edge of a rather shallow gutter and he had yelled,' He will suicide'. To which I had laughed and had picked them off the edge and handed them to him. As he had held the marbles in his grubby palm, he looked at me with the most unassuming and innocuous of faces and had confided,'Agar he wants to suicide, toh he should do, na?' Before I could protest, he had thrown them away in the gutter and had walked away merrily, chirping in a singsong voice. At first, I had been annoyed at the pointlessness of my efforts, but as I walked back to the comfort of my hammock, I thought,'Maybe the kid has a point. Who are we to decide what to do with the marbles?'