THE PURIM PRESS

“You know, the ball room was big for us at IKEA,” said Sven Kasgaard, a retired welcome officer at IKEA in Long-port, New Jersey. “Parents would drop their kids in the ball room and shop. The longer they were in the store the more they pur-chased, especially the impulse stuff at checkout. So we kept adding balls to the ball room so it would take the parent who went to pick up the children longer to find them.”

Then came COVID-19.

Atlantic County medical officer Dr. Kadur Sal recalled that her office reacted quickly to the coronavirus by closing down all ball rooms and other playgrounds. “At first, we thought that virus couldn’t survive long on the hard plastic balls,” she said, “Then we realized that the danger was the kids who were exhaling and in-haling and, well, you know little kids. Those play spaces were like giant laboratory petri dishes.”

First, the ball rooms were closed. Then they were emptied. “We thought the virus would blow over in a few weeks,” said Kasgaard, “So we put the balls in quarantine for a few weeks, filling a couple of rooms at the nearby Days Inn which had become a quarantine site early on for those recovering from COVID. The weird part is that when we went to retrieve the balls — the hotel was costing a fortune — to put them in warehouse storage, they were gone!” Not only had the missing balls checked out, they had company… somewhere, because the phenomenon of disappearing balls was oc-curring across the country. The plastic toy industry estimates that in the United States alone there were billions of ball room balls, balls that now could be…anywhere.

The public is advised to keep an eye out for colorful hard plastic spheres that might be posing as swimming pool lane separators or masquerading as those odd balls on high tension power lines. Balls have been reported hiding in home closets and garages (usually in plastic bins or cardboard boxes), and have been seen lurking in the deep weeds of golf courses and in pickleball equipment chests (look for the balls without holes). They tend to prefer being in large groups, preferably in masses about six balls deep.

— Hoping you have a ball this Purim! Rabbi Jonathan & Ellie Kremer