The Green Bouncy Ball (excerpt)

For two days, I thought I had lost my green bouncy ball. On the second day, I woke up in a sweaty panic thinking one of the dogs had eaten it and would now suffer an intestinal blockage and probably die but I wouldn’t know to save them because I have to go out of town this weekend to Dallas. I had to take a Xanax at work to calm down.

I came into possession of said green bouncy ball by frequenting, every morning for a week, the one gumball machine in my neighborhood that dispenses bouncy balls. On my morning walk with the dogs, I would cross Court Street at the long block that begins at Degraw and goes to Kane and put a quarter in the machine that sits outside the brown-colored bodega on the corner. For days, all I got were swirls. Some of which don’t even bounce. Then, one day, I got the green one. It is all one color, the color of spring, opaque but with a tiny bit of sparkle. Great bounce, good sound, really the perfect bouncy ball.

The bouncy ball obsession began after I viewed a European commercial for a Sony flat-screen TV. In the commercial, a quarter of a million bouncy balls of many bright solid colors are dropped down a steep hill on a residential street in San Francisco. This creates a weather of colored bouncy balls as they fall like rain or hail or some other strange force of nature. A perfect beautiful sad love song plays during the commercial, and I became very wistful and creative when I viewed it on the computer. I wanted to have a bouncy ball. They are harder to come by than one would think.

Thus, the green bouncy ball I came by was special. Every morning I brought it to work, and it sat on my desk. I played with it a little, but mostly looked at it and thought wistfully of the commercial and my creativity. The commercial made me want to make something that beautiful. It made me look at the world in search of such strange beautiful things. I like that feeling, so I liked the green bouncy ball on my desk at work, where I don’t always feel creative and happy. Every afternoon I took it home and it sat on my desk at home, near two other inferior swirly balls, only one of which bounces.

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