How Some Sailors Get Their Jolly’s
The sailing club at my university would house its boats surreptitiously in a field next to a barn. We were always strapped for cash, so renting storage space was always a problem. This secluded field, however, worked fine except in the summer, I ended up being the one who mowed it, and that sucked royally. The little field also became our repair area. Lying in itchy grass, working on boats and boat trailers became somewhat normal.
One day, some clubmates and I spent a whole afternoon trying to repair the bottom of a boat, and its messed-up trailer. The runners on the trailer were carpeted and their hinges were too loose to give even support to the hull, which is what caused us to have to repair it in the first place.
Well, while lying on the ground looking at trailer parts, I noticed this red object in the tall grass. It was a ball. A round ball with a funny handle. I turned it over in my hands and on the side it said in bold embossed letters: JOLLY BALL.
How could anyone could get their jollies from this ball, which didn’t even bounce, couldn’t roll, and was extremely heavy? Well, it served very nicely as a makeshift replacement-cushion for the trailer, reducing stress on the area we had just repaired. Now that gave me jollies! So I went home and I looked up “Jolly Ball,” and found out that we had deprived some poor horse of its “stress reliever.”
