Gerry LaFemina: Frisbee

It’s hard not to love the word, the way it stretches from the mouth, its extended ēē streaming into the open air like the thing itself, swirling through the evening sky.

Frisbee football. Frisbee golf. A game of catch. Another of fetch. How simple it seems, now that we all have forgotten how easily it hooked away from our target.

Who was I tossing it to? Not the girls in the commercial—Wham-O—who always seemed to smile at their boyfriends. Remember how effortlessly those guys caught it behind their backs or else by tapping it first from underneath so it paused in place and spun like a galaxy.

And that glow-in-the-dark one we owned in a different decade, in the decadent century, when we were readily awed by phosphors? It appeared to hover when flung right, greenish-white in the dusk, alight from within: a flying saucer of tiny Gullivers to visit Brobdingnarian earth. Fading, still it startled, florescent, when I’d wake late night from dream picnics, those dates I didn’t go on, those girls whose names I loved on my tongue, in my mouth, in 2 A.M.’s dismal solitude.

No one in those ads had hair that frizzed. Not once did a disc hit a hive of bees, send everyone shrieking. The whole world had been airbrushed into perfection. Oh, that radiant toy, it wasn’t a UFO though it was the future, and it seemed like the invasion had finally come.

Copyright 2019 Gerry LaFemina. From Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping (Madville 2019).