I like balls. There’s just something about them. Holding a good pair in your hands, feeling their squishiness between your fingers, bouncing ‘em all around. Balls are great.

Sometimes I go for a walk and play with my balls about town. I get some funny looks of course, but occasionally the warm-hearted smile. I guess there’s something to seeing a nearly 40-something having so much fun bouncing his rubbery balls around in public.

And they come for me (the balls do). Or maybe it’s at me. Or to me. I don’t know. But I did find a yellow lacrosse ball on a run a few months back and couldn’t resist grabbing it. So I did.

Lacrosse balls are great fun. They’re hand-sized, a little on the heavier side with a firm squish and solid bounce--in other words fun to fondle. So fondle the ball I did while prancing down the tree-lined street.

Truth have it I started to feel a little attached to that ball and almost took it home before having second thoughts. Like, How You Gonna Take Another Player’s Ball, ya know? So after having my way with it for a little while I chucked it back into the field for the next stranger. 

I had more or less forgotten about the ball when something interesting happens. On another run-–in another neighborhood—-wouldn’t you know it down there in the grass is sitting another yellow lacrosse ball. I don’t have to tell you what happened next.

I played with it. And boy did it feel good between my fingers. Wrist loose, a light grip bobbing up and down, rhythmic breathing, just me and the ball and my hand and the loose grip and the rhythmic breathing. You know, one of those moments.

The whole scene made me wonder. Was this one of those things like people say where you get what you give? Or give it away and it will return? Like an echo? An echo of balls? Yellow and solid with a firm squish bouncing right back into my hands? Perhaps so.

I tossed the ball.

Because I know this: I’ll never be ball-less. And even if I were, that’d be okay. Because it seems that every so often a good one rolls right on into my life--for me to enjoy with that loose grip and those gentle wrists and all that rhythmic breathing. Something I find slightly more couth than what the dog does.

She puts them in her mouth.

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