I don’t know if there will be a Silly Saturday post today.

What was I thinking, anyway? I was walking down the street, munching on a granola bar. It was one of those kind that’s sweet and salty at the same time. That can’t be very good for you, can it?

So I was really enjoying my granola bar, wouldn’t you? I was thinking, mmMmm, this is such a great granola bar, and just all these yummy thoughts…

When all of a sudden a basketball rolls right out onto the sidewalk!

Now if you’re like me, you’re going to take immediate notice of things like basketballs rolling right out onto the sidewalk. And lucky that I did, or I might have tripped over it! And would I have held onto my granola bar while at the same time falling helplessly to the ground? I should think not.

Well then I hear those three words, you know those three words… the ones you kind of expect to hear after a basketball rolls toward you. “Hey, little help?” called a small voice.

I looked all around for the source of the words. You might be imagining that I should be looking at basketball player height for a mouth from which said words had emanated. But no, and perhaps I wasn’t clear that this was a small voice, a very small voice.

So I was looking at small basketball player height for a mouth from which said words might have emanated. A child, perhaps. No, there was none to be found.

Remember the granola bar and all of its yummy goodness? Well suddenly then, so did I. I remembered that I was still holding a piece in my hand and I quickly ate it. I hoped that its caloric sustenance might provide me clearer thinking and more effective searching.

MmmMMmmm I thought as I polished off my tasty granola bar.

“Hey, little help?” came that voice.

There it was again, I thought. Although now that I think further about it, I believe that I thought it in the present tense even though as I tell the story in the past tense it seems more logical for my mind to be working in past tense. So long as it doesn’t work backwards, I think this will be OK.

Maybe it was the granola bar, and maybe it was divine intervention, but all of a sudden, I saw about twenty feet away a gopher. No, not a Minnesota Golden Gopher, I’m talking about a real live gopher, member of the geomyidae family of mammals. He was dressed smartly in a shiny purple basketball uniform, clearly a member of a team.

“Oh, little gopher,” I said to him, “did you lose this?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied. “So, ummm… little help PLEASE?”

A very well mannered gopher, thought I, and I reached down to pick up the ball.

I held the ball in my hands and thought back to my childhood days on the playground. I wasn’t a very good player, and so I never spent much time with the ball in my hands. And then I thought back to my fantasy adulthood, playing for the Lakers — the real ones from Minneapolis, not that west coast team that would lose six championship series to the Boston Celtics in the sixties. Vern passed me the ball, and I faked the shot and passed it off to George… and he passed it back to me, and…

I looked at the ball in my hands. I still had it, I could still dream of the big leagues.

I rolled the ball in the direction of the gopher. “Thanks, man,” he said as he scurried away.

“You’re welcome,” I called after him, but I don’t think he heard me. “Game on, little gopher!”