Four years ago, this week, I was furloughed and crushed.

• Being furloughed meant at the age of 68 and not ready to retire, I had to find someplace new to work my ass off.
• Being crushed meant that my passion for the health of moms and babies would no longer be part of my profession.

So, four years later, what's the update? Things worked out for the better. As a one-person consulting company, I absolutely love my boss, he's great. I've also had the chance to work with some great companies and agencies in a huge variety of ways, all of them either past contacts or referred by past contacts. I'm still crushed at my change in occupation, but this furlough thing has worked out ok.

This is a story about how a simple game of catch evolved into a family tradition and major neighborhood activity at our home in Cincinnati and turned our backyard into the best one in the neighborhood, maybe even the town.

The process took some time, and several steps, but when it was done, it was famous, fun, and family friendly, and kind of a dream come true in some ways for me. Read on for the details.

Everyone knows what a wiffle ball is, right? When we were kids, we all played around with one at least once. 

During our time in Cincinnati my son and I played catch in the back yard, but it was tough not being able to bat or actually play a game. 

My dad used to say: ‘if you can’t raise the drawbridge, lower the river.’ (Since he lived steps from the Neponset River in Dorchester, I figured he knew what he was talking about). 

One day, I bought one of those big red bats that are used for ‘non-competitive’ wiffle ball fun, and a half-dozen wiffle balls and started throwing to my son in the back yard so he could enjoy batting and the thrill of hitting a 'home run.'  

He’d spray the balls he hit all over the back yard, and then I would go and pick them up and we'd do it again.

It didn’t take me long to realize, the more wiffle balls I had, the more at-bats my son would get, and the fewer times I would have to stop and shag. 

So, I kept buying more and more. 

One day I was at a sporting goods store and saw one of those baskets that are used to pick up tennis balls on a practice court. You know, you hover over the ball and push down and it pops up into the basket.  

It wasn’t long before I bought and modified the tennis-ball-picker-upper for wiffle balls. Now, armed with about 100 balls, and a way to speed up the picking up of those balls, batting practice in the backyard was a blast. 

Throw a hundred pitches, pick up a hundred balls, throw a hundred pitches, pick up a hundred balls. The time it took to pick up the balls allowed the batter to rest a bit before starting over.

Well, a brother and sister had also moved to Cincinnati, and of course they wanted to try this new recreational pursuit, so it wasn’t long before they were taking batting practice, and my wife was taking batting practice, and soon we were playing wiffle ball games that everyone could play because there was no base running. 

The rules were simple, a ball hit a certain distance was a single, another distance was a double, and out of the yard or beyond the birch tree in right-center, was a home run. Of course, to give it a better look, and make it easier to determine what type of hit it was I cut the grass and created boundary markers between the distances in the grass, and I cut foul lines as well.

Other family members visited us while we lived in Ohio, and they got the chance to play as well. You mention ‘wiffle ball’ at any family gathering, and everyone smiles.

During June, July and August, there might not have been a game every night, but there were at least 4 or 5 per week, and probably some batting practice if there wasn't a game.

Because Cincinnati is at the far west edge of the Eastern Time Zone, it didn’t get dark enough to stop playing until after 8:30. But, that wasn’t good enough, so, of course, we lit the field. 

We had one light on the right field side on the back of the house, and then built a removable light pole on the left field side with a bulb changer extension pole and a floodlight array. That made us good until about 10 pm most nights.

As a final customization step, I embedded PVC pipes in the ground and screwed in posts and stretched landscape fabric from the left field foul pole to the right field foul pole to create a removable fence.

I should mention that there was a very strict Homeowner’s Association in our neighborhood, and the light pole and the fence were borderline violations, maybe, so I had to take them down every night.

Of course, we played music and sometimes grilled out, living the full back yard experience. We lived on Strawberry Hill Lane, so my son named the field ‘Twainberry Field’ in honor of one of his favorite country stars and the music we listened to most nights.

Of course, we turned a small whiteboard into a scoreboard.

When we moved back to Massachusetts we tried to recreate part of the experience, but it wasn’t the same.

However, we still have the home plate, bat, balls and ball picker upper, so let me know if you want to come over and take some batting practice, or I could bring them to your house, and you'd have the best backyard in the neighborhood for a day.