His Dogness

The kids have a basket filled with an assortment of brightly colored plastic pieces — squiggly chutes, spinning wheels — that you use to build a tower for marbles.

Put a marble in and it shoots down one section, drops to the next level where it, say, makes a wheel spin, drops down to the next level where it swirls around before dropping down to the next level until it works its way through all the pieces and reaches the bottom.

It’s a lot of fun to watch.

Our general practice is to send one or two marbles down the tower the first couple of times. Soon, it’s time to drop a handful of marbles in at the same time to watch what happens.

It starts with a headlong rush. Inevitably, though, bottlenecks develop. Perhaps marbles get jammed into the tube down the next level. One way or another, nobody is going anywhere. Give them a poke and the headlong rush begins again.

When that happened this time, Sparkle Girl said, “Black Friday.”

It was a perfect image, and Garnet and I both broke out laughing.