A thousand marbles

How lucky are government workers for their five-day routine with two-day weekend, coinciding with the same weekly school sked for their children. Having 52 Saturdays every year is a luxury that is often taken for granted, and not appreciated enough.

Have Filipinos given thoughts to Saturdays for family “priorities”, say, family gathering, or tending to gardening chores, or early morning beach hike with the rising sun? And, the family circle attending the Sunday anticipated Holy Mass in early Saturday evening and capped by outing for simple supper somewhere they can afford… Inspired by this scenario, Atty. Bimbo Suico now of Fort Myers, Florida, emailed a quaint anecdote on priceless Saturdays for family togetherness. It runs summarily as an ordinary folk tale…

“Let me tell you something that has helped me keep my own ‘priorities’. And that’s when he began to explain his theory of a ‘thousand marbles’…

“You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic.  The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years. 

“Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in his entire lifetime. Now, stick with me, and I’m getting to the important part.

“It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail’, he went on, ‘and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays.’ ‘I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy.  So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had.  I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 marbles I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear.

“Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life.

“There’s nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.

“Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time.

“It was nice to meet you, I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band.  This is a 75 Year old Man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!

“You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter.

“Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. ‘C’mon honey, I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast.’ ‘What brought this on?’ she asked with a smile. ‘Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.”

The extra blessing that Saturday brings is a welcome luxury for over-sleeping, or for catching up on belated “tinkering” over home chores, or just “whiling” away the time. The thousand marbles to mark its passage become more meaningful and spiritually fulfilling when time is devoted to family “priorities” no matter how seemingly trivial. It could just be enjoying music and favorite ballads on a Saturday, or exchanging light banter over the week, or just silently bidding goodbye to the beautiful evanescent sunset.

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