Childhood Memories In The Ball Pit
Though admittedly my childhood wasn’t all that long ago, some things I remember from it have already faded away. In the small Minnesota town that I grew up in we had what must have been one of the last operating Hardees restaurants. I wasn’t able to go there very often as my parents had a fairly healthy aversion to fast food, but we still manage to stop in occasionally. When we did I usually got a kid’s meal with an orange soda and maybe if I was lucky I could get a sundae, but I wasn’t there for the food. I was there for the ball pit.
Some kids dreamt of having trampolines or pogo sticks or tree houses in their back yards. Not me. I wanted a ball pit. Whoever cooked up the idea for a ball pit was a freaking genius. I wish I could meet him (or her). Who would have thought that swimming around in a big pit full of colored plastic balls would be so much fun? Not only could you swim in the ball pit, the balls were great for throwing at your friends. I would jump in and bury myself in the ball pit, digging down to the very bottom. Sometimes I’d find change or candy or toys down in the bottom. It made me feel like Jacque Cousteau, plunging through the deep sea.
Of course, the two or three foot deep ball pit in Hardees was just the beginning in my mind. I wanted a huge ball pit. Something Olympic sized, with a deep end and a shallow end and a diving board or two. That way I could tunnel all the way to the bottom and then back up again, staying down as long as I wanted since you could breathe through the balls, though the air tasted a little like plastic. In hindsight I’m probably better off without the Olympic sized ball pit, since I’m pretty sure if I dug down through eight or ten feet of plastic balls it would be impossible to dig myself out of. I think it’d be quite a bit tougher swimming up through a ball pit than to swim down.
Though both the Hardees and the ball pit are gone now, if I ever won the lottery I’d still put a ball pit in my house. Maybe not something Olympic sized, but it would have to be a good four feet deep, so if you wanted to you could always tunnel yourself deep down into the pit and relax, with the comfortable weight of a few feet of hollow plastic balls resting on top of you.
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