No Playing Ball in the House

On Mother’s Day, while visiting with my wife’s family one of my nephews was kicking a ball against the wall inside the house. He wasn’t kicking it too hard and it was one of those $2.99 lightweight balls, but I found myself telling him that he shouldn’t be doing that inside the house. As is usually the case when an “old” guy tells a young kid who is not their own to do something, he completely ignored me and kept on kicking the ball against the wall. To my relief, his mother told him to stop a few minutes later.

One of the rules in my house growing up was that there was no ball playing in the house. That meant no ball of any kind could be thrown, tossed, hiked, passed, shot or in any way made to fly through the air. We were allowed to roll a ball, but that got out of hand at times, too, and that was usually shut down quickly. We had a nice yard to play in so why did we need to play ball in the house? Because it could be a lot of fun. Remember, this was before the days of 100+ channels on cable and we only had about five or six channels, so sometimes we had to make up our own fun. Putting on our baseball gloves and throwing a ball from couch to rocking chair to the spot next to the fireplace could be a lot of fun, especially when you looked one way and threw the other. Tossing a football back and forth over my sister’s head was always quite entertaining, too.

Inevitably, though, someone would make an errant throw and something would get knocked over, or someone would throw a little too hard and someone else would get hit in the face, or the football would go a little too close to my sister’s head and she’d yell and scream, and Mom would put an end to the game. So at some point Dad laid down the law and there was not supposed to be any more ball playing in the house. I say “not supposed to be” because we were typical boys and still played ball in the house – as long as Dad wasn’t around. We wouldn’t have dared do it right in front of him.

One time, one of my brothers and I were tossing a wiffle ball back and forth. We weren’t hitting the ball; we were just tossing it easily back and forth to one another. We had the TV on and were throwing it occasionally while we watched the show. At some point, I threw the ball to him and he ducked out of the way. The wiffle ball hit the On/Off button of the TV and bounced back to me. We both laughed and went back to watching our show and tossing the ball back and forth. Later on, my brother went to turn off the TV and nothing happened. He pressed the On/Off button again and the TV stayed on. I thought he was kidding so I went over to the TV and pressed the button and got the same result. Now I was getting worried.

My first thought was, “Dad is going to kill me.” For some reason, whenever I did something stupid (quite a lot) or bad (not as much, but enough) I always thought that. Just so you know, as much as I dreaded him coming home at times like that, none of us were ever killed by my father. I told Mom what happened and she didn’t believe me. The big question was how could a wiffle ball break the On/Off button of a TV? She figured I must have been throwing something else. When Dad came home I had to tell him, too, and his response was basically the same as Mom’s: how could a wiffle ball break the TV? Both my brother and I explained multiple times what happened but no one was buying it. Not Dad, not Mom, and not any of my siblings who weren’t there at the time.

So the interrogation stopped and Dad reiterated that there was no ball playing of any kind in the house and life went back to normal. Oh, except for the TV, because we had to unplug it to turn it off and plug it back in to turn it on again. I think we did this for about a year before we got another TV. Apparently, to fix that button cost almost as much as buying a new set, so it never did get repaired. Every once in a while, someone would ask me “what really happened” that day, and as much as I told them how a lousy, stupid, plastic wiffle ball broke the On/Off button, I don’t think any of them believed me. I even started to doubt it myself – and I was there when it happened!

Take it from someone who’s been there and done that, don’t play ball in the house. Not even with a wiffle ball because you just never know what’s going to happen. Besides, no one will believe you broke anything with a plastic ball anyway.

Mother's Day Love

This Sunday we celebrate Mother’s Day and I just wanted to wish all the Moms out there a very Happy Mother’s Day! There are many ways to tell your Mom, your grandmother, or the mother of your children how much you love her and appreciate her. Whether it’s a card, some flowers, sharing a meal, or just talking on the phone if you live far away or have to work, I’m sure your Mom would be grateful. I know mine would.

I found some old Mother’s Day writings that my mother had given back to me and I had to laugh at the innocence of them. The first one was from my fourth grade class and was titled A Mother Is: thoughts by students in Grade 4 – Room 4. In our best fourth grade penmanship, we wrote out our deepest thoughts about what a Mom was to us. For those of you who know where I went to elementary school and were in my class (Ms. Silverstein), one of these just may be yours.

A mother is :

Someone who cares about you all the time – Robyn F.

Someone who buys you food and clothes – Eileen G.

A good friend – Suzanne C.

A person who doesn’t yell when you blow up the house with a chemistry set – David L.

A person who cooks your supper – Carol S.

A lovely person – Richard F.

Someone who gives you life – William D.

Care and love – Debra S.

Somebody who doesn’t yell at me when I did something wrong when I didn’t know better – Teri C.

Someone who loves you – Cindy D.

A person that teaches you how to do the right things – Ilise L.

Someone nice – Karl B.

A person you can tell secrets to – Vicki K.

Right by your side when you don’t feel so hot – Carolyn B.

Kind, gentle and sweet – Carl M.

Other than not getting yelled at when you blow up the house with a chemistry set, there’s a lot of truth in these and I’m very impressed with the sentiment of them. Of course, this was before the rebellious teenage years, so Vicki was still telling her Mom secrets instead of keeping them from her. 

You may be wondering, what about you, Joe? Where’s your brilliant writing about what a mother is? I actually had two items in this collection, but I’m slightly embarrassed to say they were not very insightful and were both about worry:

Somebody who worries about you when you go out with your girlfriend for the first time.

Somebody who worries when you sign up for the army.

Girlfriend? Somebody must have put me up to this because I have absolutely no recollection of liking girls when I was that age. Heck, I was only 10-years old in the fourth grade! All I cared about was baseball, hockey, football and any other sport or game that we could think of. I only thought about girls in relation to whether they could hit and throw the ball. The army I can understand since the Vietnam War was still going on and my oldest brother had been over there – thank God he came home alive and in one piece.

However, I did find another piece of Mother’s Day memorabilia, co-authored with my younger brother and my sister who is a year older than me. I think I redeemed myself nicely with this ode to Mom (with credit to my co-authors):

Mom, we still love you – okay? Happy Mother’s Day!