We grew up about a ten minute walk from one of our town’s sports fields. It might have been summer, when both my parents needed to work and Dan and I were too young to supervise ourselves, and the babysitter knew an easy way to keep us occupied was to take us down to the basketball court.
Dan had a black basketball. Probably Spalding. This doesn’t matter.
We were two little elementary school kids and a babysitter just shooting hoops on the court, which was next to a main road in the town. Just before the gas station and the turnoff to the old high school.
While we were playing, black SUV drove by the park, and a young man, probably a teenager had his torso hanging out of the passenger side window, the car in motion. He screamed once at the top of his lungs, so the whole park could hear it, “THAT’S MY BALL, YA ASS!!” The car hadn’t slowed down, just kept moving while he yelled.
None of us knew what to make of it. It wasn’t his ball, it was definitely my brother’s. There wasn’t anyone else on the basketball court, so he had to have been directing it at us. We didn’t recognize the person. We asked Lauren if it was someone she knew and she said no.
I thought about it a lot, trying to figure out why someone would say that. It wasn’t scarring or anything, it was as funny as it was puzzling at the time. Eventually I gave up trying to figure it out. I didn’t have a lot of experience with chaotic humor like that at the time, but that memory came to me yesterday while I was running and I started laughing at how funny that passenger was in that moment.