Marbles and Baseball

I heard a great expression the other night. As so often happens, it came out during a rousing evening of bunco. You remember my bunco crowd? –Twelve women of a certain age who gather to roll dice, keep score, nosh a little and laugh a lot. That’s us, the Boisterous Bunco Babes.

Anyway, as usual, we caught ourselves confusing who should move, who was keeping the score, whose partner was whose, and the ever-popular “What number are we on?”

When we finally had laughed ourselves into oblivion, one member exclaimed, “I’m losing my marbles!” In response, another uttered, “I’m on my last marble.”

They both overlooked that bunco is a game of dice, and marbles have nothing to do with it, but that’s not important right now.

I love the concept of being on one’s last marble. I wish I had thought of it myself. It’s just so perfectly apt.

Not too long ago I was getting ready to go to an early morning meeting, and just about to put my makeup on. My husband, the Center of the Universe (CoTU) came into the room to ask me about something just as I was about to begin my simple ritual. [By the way, I am not blaming him for this at all, just illustrating that I was distracted and not paying enough attention to what I was doing.]

I hit the pump on my moisturizer and smoothed a dollop onto my face. I sort of noticed that it felt funny and smelled different, but I was multi-tasking, and until I turned away from CoTU and looked in the mirror, I thought I was imagining things. Then I looked on the vanity, and realized that I had ‘smoothed on’ a glob of liquid hand soap in lieu of moisturizer. Not a good sign. Yes, it smelled good (my moisturizer is hypoallergenic and thus unscented) but now I had to stop what I was doing and wash the soap off my face, towel off, and start again. This time I made sure I hit the moisturizer pump, not the soap.

Recently I met up with some friends in a parking lot to carpool to a relatively distant theatre to see “Sunday in the Park with George”. I spent an embarrassing amount of time looking for my other glove as we switched cars, just to make sure I hadn’t dropped it on the ground outside the car. Yes, I eventually noticed that I was wearing one and holding the other, so OF COURSE I couldn’t find it on the seat or in my purse. Strike two. Getting scary.

Sounds to me as if I have one strike left, or as my friend put it, I’m on my last marble.

I will hope for another ‘at bat’, just to mix the metaphor, and I’m planning to keep a close eye on the ball.  This one’s for all the marbles.