This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in Images for East Bernard Express, 20 October 2022.
Our daughter and our grandbaby are coming from New York for an October visit about the time the Express goes to press, so naturally that’s what has filled the empty halls of my mind and heart. We’re getting ready for the much-anticipated visit!
That is the reason my wife went shopping last week for baby toys, especially wanting to find a nice rubber ball for Sybil to play with. She found nothing she deemed appropriate in Richmond and Sugar Land but came home and found the perfect ball at Dollar General in East Bernard. It’s made of rubber, and it is about the size of a cantaloupe or a small pumpkin, nicely decorated with abstract designs,
Our grandbaby has shown a liking for balls of various sizes, and no doubt shares them with Mabel, her dog, and Zadie, her cat, who joins her in her playpen. Although she likes balls, when her parents took her to a pumpkin patch in New York, she was much more interested in the hay strewn about than in the pumpkins, no doubt realizing that pumpkins don’t bounce, and they don’t roll like a ball.
As a child, I, too, loved balls, from as far back as I can remember. I especially liked the small, rubber balls about the size of a baseball, the bouncier the better. We rural school pupils exchanged Christmas gifts in the first grade, and I was so delighted because the person who drew my name gave me a splendid rubber ball! My twin brother got a comb and a small bottle of hair oil. ‘How lucky can I get,’ I thought.
Strangely enough, by the time I was in junior high, old enough to play competitive sports, I had no interest in baseballs, basketballs, or footballs! Only balls I loved, other than the rubber balls from my childhood, were tennis balls, and I became a pretty decent tennis player.
Going down the various roads of life, I never lost my love for the rubber balls of infancy and childhood, buying them and playing with them when my nephews were children, and when my daughters and older granddaughters were little. We had fun rolling balls, bouncing balls, and throwing balls, and such a good excuse to do it!
“Daddy, throw it harder!”
“Daddy, make it bounce!”
“Please, Daddy, let’s play some more!”
Well, my wife couldn’t stop with just buying a ball, albeit a superb one! The last time I looked, a clothes basket was almost full of brightly colored delights of all kinds! And they weren’t clothes either.
Aren’t we grandparents hilarious?! We get a new grandbaby, and in all the stores, the baby toys on the shelves say, “Buy me, buy me, I’m so cute!” We look ar each other and ask, “Do you think one is enough?”
It is my absolutely firm conviction that you can never have enough rubber balls! What if your grandchild had only one and it got lost? Do you think we should go back to the Dollar Store and get another? You can never have enough rubber balls!
-o-
Ray Spitzenberger is a retired Wharton County Junior College teacher, a retired Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.