Dibble Dabble

 Dibble Dabble





 

  An example of the boy that stayed inside Greg and the rest of us who were fortunate to have happy childhoods and true friends. Looking back there is  much of that in these memoirs of a cherished friendship I see clearly how much we learned from eachother. Some of it valuable and some trivial. Added all together though it made us what we are today. From Greg I learned wisdom, sentiment, humility and even some silliness. Such was the game that was played in the now perished Altadena homes of the Lawrence Sheehy family where kids got to frolic in thier swimming pools during hot Summer Southern California days. Of course, children have short attention spans and just splashing around gives way to invented games in the pool. Tossing a ball around is one distraction or closing the eyes and shouting Marco...then Polo. This one is just an aquatic tag but it does increase blood flow and release the raging hormones of youngsters. In the Sheehy pool there was a rather unique game called "dibble dabble" that involved one player diving into the bottom of the pool and releasing a tooth pick that would slowly and unpredictably rise slowly to the surface. Other kids would stand at pool's edge and try to spot the tiny slice of wood when it surfaced. When that happened they were required to shout "DIBBLE DABBLE!" as they dove toward the object with other alerted swimmers  splashing into the area spotted. While diving for a toothpick does not seem the equivalent to watching an orchestra play Beethoven it was quite stimulating for the time and place. DD caused quite a lot of hysterical laughter.  Also, as soon as the toothpick was shown by the victor the whole thing was repeated over and over and over again until everyone was exhausted or hungry or distracted. Dibble Dabble passed from generations as Greg played it and decades later Kit Kat played it in the Francis avenue natatorium. The etymology of the game and name are unknown but surprisingly the phrase dates back The earliest known use of the noun dibble-dabble is in the mid 1500s. OED's earliest evidence for dibble-dabble is from before 1563, in the writing of John Bale, bishop of Ossory, evangelical polemicist, and historian. Apparently, in the South the game is played witih a golf tee and the words have slang meaning for other stuff not suited to this blog.



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