One of my favorite memories from childhood was playing baseball with my Dad and my brothers on Saturday. We lived across the street from a school with a large, open field that could be used for anything you wanted. We wanted it to be for baseball. Saturday would come along and we’d get our gloves and a bat and a couple of balls and head on out to that field. Dad was the pitcher. One of us would bat. And whoever was left would be in the infield (we weren’t big hitters yet). We’d play for what seemed like hours and hours. Later on Dad coached our basketball team and generally encouraged us in anything we did, even when most of us turned heavily towards art.
This story isn’t about art, though. It’s about balls. For some reason I think that the ball is an invention with greatness on par with the wheel. Think of all the games, all the sports, all the uses (ballpoint pen anyone?) that balls have. I recently wrote about my son being completely awed about my ability to juggle. What was I juggling? (You’ve got it!) There are stress balls, exercise balls, sports balls, billiard balls, bowling balls, etc. It’s no wonder that our son saw me do something absent-minded with a ball while working something out in my mind and tried to repeat it.
I was pacing with a stress ball, actually, thinking about the wording and structure of an e-mail I was going to send, when I threw the ball to the ground and caught it in my hand as it bounced back up. I heard a shriek of joy. I looked down and saw my son. Standing there signing “more more more” at me frantically. I bounced the ball again. The same response. He then did something I didn’t expect: he ran to get a ball of his own. It was a tennis ball (thankfully) and after I bounced my ball once more he geared up for a big throw… but brought his arm all the way to the ground (never letting go of the ball) and then brought it back up happily. I’m confident we’ll have this fixed by the end of the week.