Velociworld

A PUNCTURE-PROOF WORLD

Kickball was the national sport when I was a child, insofar as the nation I was a citizen of consisted of my neighborhood. It was, after all, the only world I really knew. Beyond that be monsters.

Kickball is, in essence, superior to any sport played. The skill of soccer, the symmetry of baseball, the bull crudity of football, the innocence of no professional sport.

The trouble with kickball lay in the stunted landscape architecture of the postwar South. My yard, and all of my neighbors' yards, consisted of hideous landscape malevolently designed to destroy the kickball. As Charlie Brown had his kite eating tree, so every yard in my realm had at least one pyracantha bush, usually growing against a chimney, with hypodermic-like thorns, and red berries, good only for the crushing.

Every yard was also graced with a plethora of Spanish Bayonets, those venal succulents that were so unforgiving of the errant ball, or child. I remember oak trees, and Spanish moss, as a child, but I'll be damned if I remember them in my particular yard. This was the postwar house. Sububububurbia.

And so we would begin the game of a Saturday, rich as Croesus if we had two kickballs, but usually only one was in evidence. A dollar kickball was a treasure one guarded with great covetousness; you would always use the other guy's ball if at all possible.

And they would eventually hit a Spanish Bayonet prong on a scudding kick, or a pyracantha from a true foul shot. Never, in my stilted memory, do I remember a kickball game actually finishing. In fact, I'm not sure the game had an end game, the loss of the ball being in the unofficial rule book as End Of Game.

All of this nostalgic bastardy is, of course, by way of saying there is no puncture-proof world. By god how I wish there were. I wax eloquent, or base, if you will, on my outrageous sense of entitlement at times, and the leavening focus of a beat down. That is healthy stuff. But there are other aspects of life: one's friends, beloveds, where the beat down is egregious, inappropriate. And that is off the table, too. It is, after all, only by the grace of Newtonian physics that we are all not slung off the earth like so many cockroaches.

Life is a fucking pyracantha bush. You are attracted, enamored, of the beautiful red berries, mindful of their toxic nature, heedless of their barbs. But you will ultimately be deflated, humbled. No matter your size, your strength. The ball deflates, the raison d'etre evaporates into a mass of rubberized plastic. And I love this. Why?

Because we always buy another ball.