Bounce

Growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn, we played outside until our mothers called us from our apartment house balconies for dinner, making do with what little equipment we had. No fancy basketball hoops or hockey goals or makeshift baseball fields were set up on the rutted, grassless sidewalk; usually, all we had was a few of those pink bouncing balls.

It's not like we didn't have choices; there were two brands. One, Spaldeen, the other, Pensie Pinkie. Each of us had our preferences, even though, when push came to shove, we would play with either one. The Spaldeens were the lower end variety -- compact, faded pink in color, and slightly rough on the surface. The Pinkies were a bit more expensive and more pleasing to the eye and to the touch, with a dark and smooth pink surface. They were plumper than Spaldeens, and had a much more impressive bounce.

Either one sufficed for a pick up game of stoop ball or asses up or, the favorite on our block, running bases. We would all converge in the afternoon, until the weather became too impossible, kids of all ages and both genders, oblivious to the concept of organized play dates or fenced in yards. We played precariously close to the traffic, occasionally watching in horror as a stray ball or a reckless kid flew into the speeding trajectory of a car. (There were flattened balls and several broken bones, but amazingly, no deaths.)

All that was required for running bases was two older boys capable of throwing a pink ball back and forth and catching it fairly consistently, an unspecified number of bored children, and a narrow sidewalk with blocks of concrete that would provide a center line and a base on each end. The object was to run between the bases without getting tagged by one of the catchers. It entertained us for hours. One day, one of the older boys (probably trying to impress one of the girls) took a stick ball bat (i.e. a broomstick with tape for a grip) and bounced the day's Spaldeen clear across the far base line, right into the grip of a deceptively pathetic looking tree.

The little pink ball ended up caught between two little branches poking up like fingers at the top of the young sapling that had been planted into the concrete. It seemed impossible that the ball would get caught like that, held by the two flimsy looking twigs as if the tree were about to pitch a knuckle ball. We were fairly certain a few good shakes would help us retrieve the ball. A plump Pinkie would never have gotten caught that way; it would have snapped the tree in half.

No amount of shaking would help. Even Kenny, the neighborhood bruiser who had smacked the ball up there in the first place, couldn't undo the force of his bounce. Seasons came and went, the years passed, and that damn ball remained caught in that damn tree, forever out of reach. The tree's strong fingers held on, even through long winters, the pink ball the only splash of color in an otherwise black, white, and gray landscape. At some point, years later, I noticed it was gone, bounced into complete oblivion, like a bit of email spam.