A Different Fate

I almost laugh at the cheesiness of this title. And then I almost gag.

This afternoon, I had a Biology lab that consisted of counting the number of ants on sugar-soaked cottonballs every ten minutes for two hours. My group was out in the throes of nature at the Joint Science Department's Bernard Field Station - complete with the sound of car traffic and airplanes thundering overhead in sunny Southern California - for a sunny, breezy day, so it wasn't as bad as it might have been. It could have been better, though; I could have not had to count ants at all.

After the ordeal was over (okay it was only a few bugs), my lab group was walking back to the science center when we spied a trash can. We had no use for the sugary cottonballs, some of which were still ant-laden, and other members of our lab section had already tossed away their lab tools, so we decided to do so, as well. As I cast mine in with the other discarded cottonballs, I noticed something a little unusual. Sitting at the bottom of an almost-empty trashcan was a volleyball, perfectly round. Being a former volleyball-player in high school, it pricked my heart a little at such a waste. It hadn't looked lopsided from my perspective; just to make sure, I took another peek.

There it was, sitting at the bottom of the trash can, a blue, white, and gray Tachikara volleyball, probably a Soft-Touch by the look of it. It looked a little lonely, and I'd been itching for the past week to play volleyball; however, I had no one and nothing to play with. This might just have been my chance.

I reached over the rim of the trash can and poked it; it was even still inflated! A group of students must have broken into the Field Station and either lost or left their volleyball behind, which an instructor or an environmentally-conscious Pitzer student must have picked up and thrown out. A perfectly good volleyball!

Despite the stigma of picking things out of the trash, as well as the stickiness, I plucked the volleyball from its impending fate and took it home with me. I washed it multiple times with dish soap and hand sanitizer; I hope that's enough. My loving caresses alone should be enough to eradicate any miscreant microbial entities, but one never can be too sure. Wow, I'm alliterative this evening.

And now, as I sit typing this blog post, my new volleyball sits on the floor. I am immensely proud that I now not only have a volleyball, but also the means through which I obtained it. I feel good that I saved it from being lost in the abyss of a trash dump, I don't feel guilty about not finding the original owner, and I feel even better that didn't have to pay a cent for it. Their fault they left it behind; my gain that I had the guts to take it from the trash. And now... anyone up for playing a little bit of volleyball?