The Devil Has One Ball

You can tell it is near the end of my summer vacation, what with the only subject I have to discuss being The Devil's Playground. I guess that's because I go there every day. Not by design. It's just that something always comes up that I need, and The Devil has it all. I bet the Hillbilly family gives more money to The Devil than the Duggars do.

Baseball Aficionado H has free tickets to some FanFare thingy in St. Louis. I know that's not the name of it, but it escapes me, and I don't care enough to research it. Google is your friend. Anyhoo, the tickets are for Sunday. HH wanted me to traipse through The Devil's Playground and pick up 5 baseballs. People! That is the only corner of the Playground that I do not frequent. I hate hiking across that vast waistboobsweatland to get the stuff that is actually necessary for life. Like toilet paper and Pepcid.

The Pony and I ventured to the far corner of The Devil's lair, where we found ZERO baseballs. Oh, there were softballs galore, in white or greeny-yellow, in boxes and cellophane wrappers. But no baseballs. Then The Pony spied ONE baseball on the back of the shelf, inside a little kid baseball glove. He dug it out. Of course it had no wrapper and no box. I sent The Pony to ask a Devil's handmaiden if there were more. Oh, no. Of course there were no more. "Everything we have is on the shelf." Pity that they waste that 10-acre storeroom in the back. It must cost a lot to not-air-condition that empty, unneeded vacuum. I took the bare baseball, and a wrapped softball, too. My momma didn't raise no fool. At least not the kind of fool that stands in a check-out line waiting on a price check.

We finished our shopping in short order, which in this case means 30 minutes. Everything was in the top part of the cart, the part where you sit your toddler and let his chubby legs kick you all the way through the Playground. The Pony urged me to go through the 20 items-or-less checkout, even though I thought I had more. I piled that crap on the conveyorless counter. A dude was telling a chick that he would be right back. Did she think she would be all right? So I took that moment to say, "Wait a minute. I want this baseball, but there were none with a price, so I brought up this softball marked $3.50 in case that would give you some idea." Because we all know that sometimes, the flustered clerk will ask, "There's no price. Do you remember how much it was?" Dude said he would take both balls and ask his manager. Ha ha. During that time, the Check-out Chick said she knew how to do that, it's just that she messed up some WIC stuff and they made her come to the short lane and have someone standing over her to retrain her. Dude came back and said to scan the softball but sell me the baseball. See. I knew it. And since when do softballs cost $3.50? Those little sweatshop kids must be rolling in the dough over in Malaysia. Or else that Rawlings factory in Licking is cranking out balls now.

On the way to the library to pick up the #1 son after a stop at Sonic for a sweet, sweet strawberry slush to stimulate the economy, I heard on the radio that Cardinal great Lou Brock would be signing stuff at Macy's. Which is neither here nor there, but I always liked Lou Brock, that backflipping little fireball who stole bases like nobody's business. And seemed like a stand-up guy every time he was in the news for something. But the radio said that Lou would only sign items bought at Macy's, which got me thinking about HH's shindig, and that probably they would not sign outside items either. I called #1 at the library, and he looked it up, and could only find a FAQ that said you were not allowed to bring in bats and get them signed. Well, duh! Bats are kind of like a weapon, and who wants a bazillion fans swinging weapons around a baseball fanfare? Not me, that's for sure. There just might be some Cubs fans. And we don't mix, you know, the Cardinals and the Cubbies. But I'm betting that they won't let people bring in their own balls, either. Ha ha. And the authorized balls will cost more than $3.50, I'm betting.

That HH. Every time he gets something free, he costs me money. But I did manage to cheat The Devil. I had 28 items. Not counting that softball.