When the marbles roll

The thing about losing your marbles is that once the earth starts quaking, once the ground starts heaving, once the marbles start rolling, the possibility of those marbles ever rolling back to you, present and accounted for, seems as impossible as losing all those marbles to begin with.

I lost my marbles on Friday, May 29, at about quarter past nine in the morning. My life, my future, everything, began rolling away in all directions.

How to describe it? Let me try. ...


I was at work when things got real bad real fast. Reality slipped off its rim and went caterwauling into the abyss, and I was the silver rim left behind, coming to a standstill.

That hardly describes it.

I felt like my consciousness shattered into a million pieces,  like all that would be left was a piece of torn cloth dangling from barbed wire.

And that hardly describes it.

I lost my marbles at about quarter past nine on Friday, May 29, and I had never lost my marbles before.

In the corner office of my mind, where I serve as CEO of Felix Carroll's Marbles Inc., suddenly there was no order, no one in charge, everything buried in debris, the windows left open, the rain smudging the ink, rendering indecipherable the paper trail that led back to me.

I had been the proud owner of marbles. I had invested them in all the things and people I love. Then, abruptly, frighteningly, efficiently, the market crashed. It became my own, private Black Friday.

I don't know for how many minutes — more than five, less than 20 — I panicked alone.

Then, suddenly, a thought I could hold on to: brain tumor. Was that it? It had to be, right? A heavy-footed tumor attacking the city of my mind, making all the heavy, important things look comically puny. You don't know big until it enters your brain and starts flinging things around. I remember thinking tumor, and that's when the ground stopped quaking and the earth stopped heaving and the marbles stopped moving.

I may be the first human in history to be calmed by the prospect of a brain tumor. But I clung to it — tumor, tumor, tumor — because it anchored me back to the order of things. And I could feel how the marbles were gathering in solemn formation and slowly rolling back to me. Even though I was certain nothing would be the same again, the thoughts of a tumor grounded me in reality — in this world, the one we all agree exists, the one where I have a wife and 6-year-old son and a home and a bunch of tomato plants growing out back.

I was at my desk. I remembered my wife. I remembered our phone number. I called her, and I asked her to come get me because something was terribly wrong.

She arrived, her face white with alarm, and on the way to the emergency room I thought the following things in the following order:

• I am either about to die or I'm entering a radically different phase of my life that will involve lots of doctors, perhaps the loss of normal neurological functioning, and perhaps lots of hospital Jell-O wiggling at me from a cafeteria tray.
• My life insurance will pay off the mortgage (sweet victory!), and cover my boy's future college costs and a whopping Irish wake that I would surely expect.
• I hope my wife eventually finds a new love, but not this year and maybe not next year either, an honest, kind, remarkable man, but he has to be uglier than me and not have a vacation home in Tuscany.
• I hope I've done a good enough job helping my son understand how much I love him, how much his birth and existence set me straight, and that life doesn't end at death, that the veil is thin, that love doesn't disappear — it's permanent, like the pyramids, like the oceans, like, apparently, Newt Gingrich.

My wife and I were already making jokes halfway through the frantic ride, because that's how we handle things. I don't remember the jokes. I remember feeling giddy that she and I had unexpectedly found ourselves playing hooky from work on a Friday morning, even though the circumstances were not favorable. I remember feeling at peace because I know — I really know — there's a Cosmic Plan and that everything will be OK even when everything seems so hopelessly far from OK.

Now four months (and many doctors) later, mostly what I feel is mortification by many of the things on that bullet list above — the maudlin, self-indulgence of my frenzied thoughts — because, apparently, I'm not going to meet Elvis anytime soon. It wasn't a tumor. The diagnosis: epileptic seizures in the temporal lobe. There are pills for this, of course. And, of course, I swallow them and go about my life like millions of others on meds.

And the bottom line is this: Apparently, I will need to pay off the damn mortgage myself. Apparently, I will not, for now, have to trace my reflection in a gelatin square.

Apparently, I will need to be the kind, loving man I imagined taking my place. And I should really someday take my wife to Tuscany.

And I will have to figure out a way to help my boy understand and trust in the fact that love is the rock, laughter the mortar, God the designer, and that these things don't ever just suddenly roll off and disappear.

And I'm so happy lately — really, genuinely, deeply, and maybe even obnoxiously happy — that it probably appears as though this goofy grin glued to my face is some sort of sign I've lost my marbles.