I think I mentioned that cleaning out my dad’s basement led to discovering a few boxes in which he stored some of my stuff without telling me, so I found a bunch of things I hadn’t seen in some cases since the 1980s.

It may be tempting for some people just to throw things away. Some of the things I found included tennis balls from when I took tennis lessons, a few baseballs, and some other sports balls (racquetball? I’m not sure what a couple of them are for). Forty-year-old tennis balls aren’t good for playing tennis with, so what can I do with them to avoid throwing them away.

Let’s remember that once you extract oil from the Earth’s crust into the biosphere, the pollution has happened. The best you can do to prevent people (and wildlife) suffering from it is to delay it. Eventually it reaches the ocean, the atmosphere, your food, your lungs, your children, and so on.

Once you buy something that was extracted, you’ve paid for future extraction. The line that “the plane was going to fly anyway” is self-serving hogwash. That’s not how supply and demand work.

So these tennis balls, I already paid for them decades ago so can’t undo that I paid for subsequent extraction, pollution, and depletion. I can’t stop that they’ll end up in the ocean, atmosphere, and our bodies, but I can delay it.

There are several dog runs near me and I see in them dogs playing with tennis balls. Instead of putting these balls in the trash, I held on to them with the plan to drop them off at dog runs for dogs to play with. Possibly some people who might buy tennis balls to put there might delay buying replacements. If so, I will have contributed to decreasing funding for new extraction.

I couldn’t be sure it would benefit the dogs until I did it. Now I have proof. Here are some pictures of dogs playing with tennis balls I delivered to them from the 1980s. I hope to bring you more pictures of happy dogs with my old tennis balls. As it turns out, the next time I delivered them, the dogs ignored them, though I figure they got used eventually.

---

---

---

---

---

EDIT, May 16, 2025: more pictures from delivering a couple more tennis balls:

The dog had just played with the ball to the side that I threw to it but started walking away by the time I could take the picture:

Then it happened again that the dog stopped playing with the second ball by the time I took the picture, but cute anyway. Yes, it was the same dog:

---

June 6, 2025: At Union Square this time, it’s hard to see, but the brown dog under the teal umbrella is playing with the ball I threw to it. I think it was a lacrosse ball. The three I have left are baseballs.

---

EDIT: August 27, 2025: My first time delivering the dogs some balls from my childhood, this time baseballs. Here they are playing with them:

---

September 2025, this time I found a ball someone had littered so gave that to the dogs:

---

EDIT: March 28, 2026: This winter was colder than usual. Several weeks saw temperatures 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit lower than usual nearly every day for maybe three weeks in a row, plus other times. I finally found a time to go to the park when I had time to watch the dogs and throw them a tennis ball and super-pinky ball.

The black dog in the middle is chasing the tennis ball I just threw to it. It’s behind the dog so you can’t see it in this picture, but you can in the next.

Here the dog has it in its mouth, though you have to zoom in a lot to see it.

The ball made it to near the gate where I stood. I just missed this dog playing with it, but you can tell it did because the owner is pulling it away from it.

The dog moving left in this image has the super-pinky in its mouth:

In the next two pictures too:

---

---

Only one ball left, a baseball, to bring to the dog run. I pick up other balls that I find while picking up litter so I’ll keep bringing them more balls, temporarily giving them use before they become toxic garbage.

The long-term solution is to stop making balls that don’t biodegrade. It’s possibly baseballs do, but I don’t know.

• ← What’s the opposite of a land acknowledgment?
• More Life-Changing, Inner-You-Revealing, Passion-Unleashing Magic of Initiative →