Catch
Your baseball glove. It’s a deep golden brown and mottled with stains. Smell the leather tinged with sweat. The sweetness of oil has seeped into the cracks and creases. There’s a flashback of memories that tumble down the hills of your mind. Early one spring morning, your old man interrupted the Saturday slate of cartoons with this present. The glove was so stiff and unforgiving. He took you out to the garage and handed you a bottle of oil that looked like it had been passed down through a hundred generations.
With a shop rag that had spent more time dirty than it had ever spent clean, you squirted a tiny amount of the liquid onto the rag until you could feel it seep through the cloth and dampen the tips of your fingers. In the subsequent moments, you glanced down at the glove and then up at your father, who nodded approvingly, gesturing with little more than his eyes. You hesitated, not because you didn’t know what to do next but because somehow you wished to extend this moment onward into infinity, surrounded there by tools, machines, and the underlying odor of sawdust and gas.
Your old man couldn’t help himself and took the glove and rag from your hands and showed you in meticulous detail the right way to oil it, passing an even application in semi-circles until every square inch was covered. Then, he placed the glove within the metal jaws of a vice grip, slowly squeezing it shut. He was careful to slip in spare rags to protect the leather.
“Now, we wait,” he said with a smile of satisfaction. His hawkeye blue gaze mirrored yours and, for a moment, you both forgot who was the father and who was the son.
You were ready to stand vigil until the ceremony was complete, however long it might take, until mom yelled that it was time for dinner. She had made stuffed cabbage, which was something that you had despised as recently as that morning. But those were the tastes of a child, and you had since become a man and it would forever be your favorite dish.
The following day you rose early and snuck out to the garage. In its sawdusted stillness, it felt like entering a shrine. You released the vice grip with a few belabored twists and then slipped the glove onto your hand. Your imagination ran wild, alternating between glimpses of World Series championships and the childhood belief in superpowers.
It was heavy — you pinched your thumb and fingers together in an effort to close the web, which you did, but just barely. Then there was your old man standing there in the frame of the kitchen door with an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.
“You still need to break it in,” he said, hitting the button on the garage door. It came alive with a creaking shudder. Sunlight seeped in the first few moments before swallowing the room whole. The sensation was like being in the belly of a whale.
You looked up at the robin egg sky with the cracked yolk of the sun dripping down between the leaves of the maple tree. The grass was uniform and freshly shorn. In well-worn sneakers, you sprinted across the yard like Willie Mays in center field, hoping for an over-the-shoulder grab. Your old man stepped to the mound to throw out the first pitch. You punched the palm of your glove a few times like you’d seen on TV, then stood at the ready.
His windup wasn’t what it used to be, with the high leg kick that you once saw in a yellowed newspaper clipping. But he could still bring the heat. The smack of the ball hitting leather cracked like a whip and stung like a bee.
“Ow!” you yelped.
A glint appeared in the corner of your old man’s eye.
“First lesson: always catch it in the web.”
You nodded as your fingers found the red-stitched seam of the ball. You heaved it with all your might, even though the boys at school said you threw like a little girl.
“Noodle arm,” they called you with stuck out tongues and thumbs in ears.
There it went, soaring high over his head until somehow he pulled it down from the stratosphere, hitched up his blue jeans, and then instructed you to throw from the shoulder and not from the wrist.
Back and forth the ball went in that lulling rhythm. Birds perched on branches watched you sweat and stumble. Their chirps were little cheers, even though you weren’t much of a fielder.
Somewhere, deep in the back in your mind, you registered the significance of this day, realizing even then that it would be something important to remember. Despite your youth and the aching desire to be just a few years older, you intuited that days like these wouldn’t last forever and that every game of catch must eventually come to an end.
After shagging fly balls, your old man decided to toss you some grounders. He threw a sidewinder that skipped along the emerald surface of the yard, then jumped up to kiss you on the mouth.
Never the most creative group of boys at school, they called you “Fat Lip” after that.
Now, it’s half a lifetime later and the glove slips back onto your hand. Your old man has been gone since God knows when. You never did make it the pros, of course, or gain superpowers, but that’s okay. You carved out your niche and shared it with another.
Your baby girl sneaks out to the garage and sees you waxing nostalgic with maybe a tear or two in your eyes.
“Hey, Dad?”
You hold back on the sniffle and turn with raised eyebrows to say, “Yeah?”
She’s holding her brand spanking new Rawlings glove in hand. A mix of hope and excitement is written on her face.
“Ready to play some catch?”
