Ninja Balls Love Letter

Dear Grant, 

This is what started it all… it’s not the first video listed on TKOR; but it’s the first video we did that began our life of making videos. We did this project first in the backyard of our neighbors house.  We didn’t have a backyard of our own yet.  

You’d gather all the materials and head off for the neighbors.  I smiled as I watched you walk back and forth from our little apartment to their backyard.  You carefully prepared all the materials, moving with such excitement filled speed and direction. You had a mission. Then, when everything was prepared and you were ready, I'd gather our little toddler and meander over to be part of the action. 

When I close my eyes, even now, I can see how big that energy was.  I feel like I can touch the vitality you lived in that built this dream.  It was the anticipation of each moment in our lives. It was that shared story of possibility.  It felt like anything was possible in those days.  

That feeling seems like the secret elixir to life. It’s where the innocence of naivety exists and fuels passion. You believe anything is possible and nothing will ever go wrong, because we were both so filled with hope.  

Those days were full of that hope, before ‘The King of Random’ ever existed. They were magic.  The kind of magic that, now; I sometimes wonder if it only exists before you’ve achieved all the great things or lived too much of life.  The magic moments that exist in the possibility of a future that didn’t yet exist.  

I still think of the way your face lit up every time you finished a ninja ball.  One after the next, after the next.  It was as if you could make them forever.  The joy never dwindled with repetition.  That was the magic in you. 

You lived a life where anything you did, whether it was a small thing like changing the baby’s diaper or a fun thing like making ninja balls or even a big thing like liquifying metal in the metal melter; anything life asked you to do, you transformed it. You made it into an experience that made the mundane magical and the magical possible.   

Thank you Grant for living a magical life that I got to share with you.  I lost the magic when I lost you.  I started to forget.  It was so painful to try to remember, but I want to remember now.  

Thank you for leaving the evidence of your magic here for me and the boys to watch over and over and remember.  Thank you for the memories I have in each video you gave the world, they are my treasures. They are treasures for us all. 

Happy Birthday Grant.  

I love you.  

Love, 

Janae