TRACTOR-BEAM SEASON . . .

Ahhh, it's that time of year again. Time to raise your face to the warmth of the sun which is still cool enough to not burn you to a crisp. Time to break out the open-toed shoes, the Birkenstocks, the flip-flops. Time to refill the propane tank and fire up the grill. Time to lust after the luscious aroma of charbroiled meat wafting through a neighborhood near you. Time to gather up some of the cronies for some Ultimate Frisbee, or volleyball, or wiffleball, down at the local elementary school field. Which brings me to my next point: time for my force field to thaw.

See, I have a force field, roughly the size of a dining room table for 12, hovering around my cranium. From about late-October to mid-April, my force field is relatively inactive. Once it thaws, however, the tractor beam within is unleashed, sucking in anything that enters the force field and causing it to hit my head. Over the course of my entire life, my tractor beam has managed to pull in:

- beach balls
- volleyballs
- a baseball
- softballs
- wiffleballs
- a plastic practice golf ball
- ping pong balls
- tennis balls
- red rubber kickballs
- field hockey balls
- a plastic hockey puck
- basketballs
- soccer balls
- footballs
- frisbees
- plastic bouncy balls
- a lacrosse ball
- a boomerang

It's not that I'm clumsy; I'm coordinated enough to dance, do step aerobics and multi-task most of my activities. It's not even that I'm often in the way of these objects; the majority of the time, I'm innocently sitting off in the distance, chatting with force-field-less friends. It's just my damn tractor beam. I can't turn it off, I can't deactivate it, I can't even counter it with some contrary gravitational force. I can only be thankful that I have yet to suffer any severe damage as a result of these incidents (some might disagree, actually, but they'd be wrong).

I should probably just wear a helmet everywhere from May to September. That would probably severely limit my social life, and a helmet wouldn't really go with any of my nice summer sundresses, but at least I wouldn't be the only idiot at the picnic holding a bag of ice to my forehead the whole time.