Where I Talk About Playing Ball

One of my most favorite things to do in the world is to play ball. Believe it or not, I am not sure Mom ever played ball before I came, but I have taught her how to play, and now I believe she loves it, too! Oh sure, she jokes with me sometimes about it. When I beg her to come out and play in the yard and its 98 degrees and the skitas are biting or when there’s snow on the ground and the wind is so cold it freezes your patooties off, she’ll tell me I’m crazy if I think for one minute she's going to come outside and play. But she does come out, more often than not, even when it’s dark outside and she stumbles around the yard because she can't see too good.  She’ll say “You’re killing me, Newlie,” but I know she doesn’t mean it. Honestly, if she really and truly didn’t like to play ball, she wouldn’t come out, would she? Mom says it’s not the ball she loves, but I don’t know what she means.

Mom is actually a terrible thrower. She is so bad that I think sometimes she must have some kind of birth defect. I tell you, when she throws the ball it never goes more than two feet away from her and never in the direction that she means for it to go. Early on, Dad told her to use an old tennis racket that was down in the basement and that has worked out fine. She can hit pretty good with it, from the front to the back of the yard, and our yard is nice and big. Mom likes to hit balls from corner to corner so that I get a work-out running back and forth across the yard. She has to stay very still, though, when this is going on, otherwise she will get mowed down by a hairy, 85 pound freight train. I like to fake her out, too, and start running for the corner where I think she is going to hit next. Sometimes I get there before she hits the ball and that’s a bummer. But I really love it when she hits a line drive and I jump up and catch it in my mouth! Mom always yells “Good boy!” when I do that and then starts muttering about how much it will cost to have a dentist fix my teeth.

Mom bought me a ball machine way back when I first came here, but it might be dead now. She used to use it sometimes as a change from hitting the ball with the racket. The way it works is that you put balls in a basket thing and then they roll down to the bottom and pop out. You can hear a little noise when it’s getting ready to go off and then Bam, it shoots the ball out into the yard. Mom actually hits it farther than the ball machine, but there is something so exciting about watching it pop out, hearing that little noise and waiting for it to fire. Sometimes, I couldn’t wait and would try to grab it away from the machine and then Mom would fuss and tell me that I was going to get my eyes put out if I wasn’t careful. Moms are awful silly sometimes.