I've mended my first sparkleball so many times it looks like somebody sat
on it. But lit up at night, it still looks almost perfect.

On a dark November night in 1993, my friend Trudy and I were zipping down a two-lane highway outside Tyler, Texas when I shouted Stop! Turn around! Go back! Go back!   Trudy, who was driving-- and being one of my oldest and most trusted friends-- made an immediate u-turn. And then another, until we were bouncing up a dirt driveway to a rundown mobile home.
  There, in the dark, strung across a clothesline, were a bunch of lit-up plastic spheres. Each one blinking, dancing, whirling to its own multi-colored rhythm. It looked like a formation of little UFOs hovering over this empty piece of Texas.
  A man carrying a beer came out. (By this time, Trudy thought I was totally crazy. I mean, we're on a dark stretch of Texas highway about to talk to an inebriated man-stranger outside a battered mobile home.)
  I was hypnotized. I got out of the car and walked over to the clothesline. The man said the lightballs were for sale. "Cuplights" he called them.
  He pulled one down, and up close, I could see it was nothing more than a bunch of plastic cups and a string of Christmas lights. It was hard to imagine such humble objects coming together to make something so absolutely magical.
  We bought three: one for me, one for Trudy, and one for our childhood friend, Finley, who we were on our way to see in Dallas.
  A few days later I flew home to Richmond clutching my "cuplight" as a carry-on. It
 

was an immediate hit with my children, and that Christmas it became a treasured holiday tradition. (I don't remember when we first called it a Sparkle-ball, but we did and that's what it's been ever since.)
   All these years that old Sparkleball has been my constant companion. Through divorce and a move from Richmond to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Across the country to San Diego where I lived (and surfed) for ten years. And now remarried, and living in Texas. A full cycle.
  Like me, the Sparkleball is a little worse for wear. Some of the cups are paper-clipped together. Others are stapled. I've mended it over and over, but the lights still work fifteen years later.
  I finally taught myself how to make Sparkleballs and now have made dozens. I've had Sparkleball-Making Parties. I made Sparkleballs for a bar in San Diego. Friends say I should start a business or charge for the instructions.
  But every Christmas when I hang up my original Sparkle- ball and plug it in, I'm reminded of that dark Texas night and how it's those little detours we take in life that give us the most joy. And I reaffirm the fact that if I, an egghead serious negativizer, can get this much pleasure from something so simple, maybe I need to give it away. This website lets me do that.
  Just call me a Missionary of Sparkleballs.