The Glove
A short-story my pops wrote:
The Glove
by Alan Dunn
I am left-handed.
Ricky Lynch was the only other left-handed kid in the whole neighborhood. We were fairly good friends, but not exactly best friends. We weren’t the "nothing-could-ever-come-between-us" best friends that Paul and I were. But this left-handed thing had forged a special bond between me and Ricky. See, Ricky had a left-handed baseball glove . . . and I didn’t.
I don’t remember why I didn’t have a glove like most every other kid on the block. It does seem to be one of the basic tools of boyhood, but I was without. If things were tight around the house from a financial standpoint, I never knew. If we lived by a strict budget, it never affected me. I do know that my parents didn’t just run out and buy whatever it was we kids wanted or thought we needed. Nor did we grow up expecting that they would. I do remember that there were plenty of lessons involving the fact that money did not grow on trees and other such noble truths. These lessons usually followed a lost toy or a torn knee in a good pair of pants. But then, all the moms and dads said stuff like that, and their kids had a glove. Maybe I just lost my glove. Well, for whatever reason, I was struggling through childhood less than fully equipped.
Most times, Ricky would allow me to use his baseball glove. We would share. Sharing a baseball glove presents one simple problem. Ricky and I had to be on different teams. As long as we could work around this requirement, all was well. At the end of each half inning, the glove was flipped from one lefty to the other, as one team trotted off the field in victory over the third out and the other team walked on arguing over whose turn it was to play short. This little exchange meant that Ricky’s glove was never idle, and that I could always play.
Ricky lived next to the park, near the ballfield. When he wasn’t playing because of supper or having to go visit Aunt Lil, I could just drop by and borrow his glove from the back step. Those were days when you could leave your glove or your bat or even your bike in the yard and not worry that it would be stolen as soon as you were in washing your hands. Those were better days. Anytime I needed a glove in order to play, I would rummage through the wire frame milk crate on his porch by the kitchen door. There I would find one well-worn left-handed glove. All in all, it was a rather reliable system.
I was getting to be eight or nine. Playing baseball in the park behind our house was how my friends and I spent nearly every waking hour between Easter and Thanksgiving. We took small breaks for things like school and an occasional meal. But for the most part, from nine a.m. till the streetlights came on, it was baseball. Even if there were only two guys in the park, one would "hit some" to the other. Three kids could play "500." Four could play Homerun Derby. Five was enough to have a real game with "pitcher’s hand out" and anything right of dead center is foul. If one of the two lefties was up, then right was fair and left was foul. In our neighborhood, having enough players for a decent game was seldom a problem.
The neighborhood, as I knew it, was really just one block. A clearly defined piece of suburbia that ran from where our street met Forest Drive at the stop sign, to the apartment building just before you get to 45th Avenue. The fence behind my house, and the eight other houses on our side of the street, bordered The Park. It had a legislated real name of some sort, but to us it was always just The Park. Years later, when I was in high school, the name of the park was changed to honor the first policeman in our town killed in the line of duty. The better days were passing.
Ten years before we moved in, the park, the whole town for that matter, was nothing more than a swath of truck farms. Acres of tomatoes, strawberries, beans, and corn. South of 45th Avenue, it still was. The town was as flat as a bean field. And our town was as flat as all the other towns that straddled "The Ridge." Some great number of years ago, a glacier had inched its way south, pushing and piling up terrain into the region’s only discernible feature, The Ridge. It’s a thirty-mile long high point that wouldn’t even be considered a hill outside the prairies of the Midwest. From there, the glacier retreated some five miles to the north where it melted and became Lake Michigan. The land runs from both sides of the ridge with an almost unnoticeable slope. There’s not a real hill or rise for fifty miles. Corn to the south, steel to the north. I could step into a farmer’s field from the end of our street. Or I could sit in the park and watch the night sky glow, as the heat and fire showed on the clouds above Inland Steel when they tapped molten iron from the belly of a furnace. Our suburban island, with its new houses and neatly planted maples and elms, lay between the rich farmland of Indiana and the industries and industrial cities that lined the shore of the Great Lake.
The Park was the centerpiece of my childhood. Seven and half acres of grass dabbed into the middle of a thousand three bedroom split-levels and raised ranches. Most were built with the GI Bill. The houses were not exactly alike, but were similar. The occupants were not exactly alike, but they too were similar. Nearly every father on our street had fought in Europe or the Pacific. There probably was not a ten-year age spread between them all. With few exceptions, each house contained at least three or four children, one black and white television that picked up four stations, hardwood floors, and an unfinished basement. Only two or three people owned a second car. Billy Taylor’s mom was the only mom that had a job. And nobody knew anybody who had ever been divorced. Those were better days.
When I was six, the park was just a field. Weeds and construction debris recreated the terrain of the Old West or war-ravaged Europe. It was the sight of many a fierce and savage battle, all fought with plastic guns. But then the town moved in. They graded it, seeded it, and planted trees that were younger than I was. Then a set of swings, a merry-go-round, teeter-totters, and a slide were constructed. The park came alive with an army of children at play. Most of the trees didn’t make it. Then the town got down to business --- the baseball field. In the same place where we kids had paced off a makeshift diamond for two or three summers in a row, the town built a field. A real baseball field --- chainlink all around, two hundred feet down each baseline, a real homeplate, a backstop, and a pitcher’s mound. And as if life wasn’t perfect enough . . . dugouts. Out-of-the-sun-into-the-shade, hardwood bench, honest to gosh dugouts! Those were great days.
It was a wondrous place and time to be a little boy. In our neighborhood (that stretch of street between Forest and 45th), boys outnumbered girls by a ratio of better than three to one. Over two dozen male children between the ages of five and twelve. It was definitely lop-sided, but it was glorious circumstance for the proliferation of team sports. The sport of choice was hardball. Every kid, every guy-kid, played baseball. Playing ball was an obligation of citizenship in our youthful social structure. It was the single most common thread that ran through our lives. Baseball was what we did. Ballplayers was who we were.
As soon as any two or three of us began to play, it was like a call to arms. Bluejean and while T-shirt clad 3rd and 4th and 5th grade boys came running. Those living next to the park bounded over fences with bats carried at the ready. Bicycles with ball gloves hooked over the handlebars coasted to their resting place near the third base dugout. Bats and whatever balls could be found were tossed in a pile for mutual use. And someone needed to find the brick we used for first base.
A ritualistic dual soon followed known as "flipping for first pick." It involved a bat and the two captains. The international rules governing such a flip seemed always open to some new interpretation. Often, Ricky and I would be the captains. (It solved that shared glove thing.) First pick bats last, always. Odd man, or any squirt not big enough or good enough to play, was usually the official catcher, until someone else showed up. An official catcher meant you were out if he caught a pop foul. It also meant a play at the plate. Otherwise, the runner goes back to third if the ball beats him home. Hey, rules is rules. Had Ricky’s glove not been there for me to use, I might have been banished to that "official" job behind home plate, struggling with a wrong handed glove and never getting to bat. A fate worse than summer school.
It was never too hot to play, it was seldom too cold, and only the moms seemed to be bothered by lightning. As long as Ricky’s glove was available, my ball playing days were endless. Not having a glove of my own was never much of a problem, until . . .
It was a big game of some sort. Some challenge or something from the creeps in the next block. I don’t recall all the details, but it was an us-against-them kinda thing. Ricky and I could not be on opposite sides. One of us would not get to play. Ricky’s patience had run out. "Go buy your own dumb glove!"
It was me that didn’t get to play that day. There was nothing to do but go home, dejected. Hurt by friends, left out of what was maybe the biggest game of our lives, and hating the unfairness of life for having been born a southpaw. It suddenly mattered that I didn’t have my own glove. It was suddenly the most important thing in my life.
I was sitting on the back door step when my father came home from work. I sat where I knew he would stop to take off his work boots before entering the house. The car would stop in the driveway at 4:20, give or take seconds. He was a man that deviated seldom from the day-to-day routines that bounded his life. My father was not perfect, but he was consistent, and tonight he was right on time. He set his lunchbox and Thermos bottle on the concrete and settled in next to me. Silently he unlaced his heavy boots. He knew something was wrong and that I was waiting for him. Waiting for my dad.
He smelled of steel, welding, and hard work. There was an outline of clean around his eyes and the top of his forehead where hardhat and goggles had shielded him from his dirty and dangerous work. Ironwork. Skilled labor. Hard labor. My father built things. He built buildings and bridges. He worked in the mills and refineries that lined the lakeshore. A union man. He framed the steel roof on the new school gymnasium and he climbed the skyscrapers of Chicago. It was very hot work, then it was very cold work. It was always dangerous work. I never knew a day when he did not leave the house before the sun was up. If baseball in the park defined who I was, then work and providing for the family defined my father. That was what he did. That was who he was. But now he was home, and he knew that I hurt.
Tears inched down my face, as I explained the tragic end of my life, here at nine. And how a baseball glove, or rather, the lack of a left-handed baseball glove, had caused such devastation. He listened. With his powerful hand on my shoulder and his scratchy unshaven cheek resting on my forehead, with my tears making patterns on the walk, he listened.
"I’ll tell you what . . . " he started. His voice cut through my sobbing and sniffling. It cut all the way to whatever places hold the definitions of who and what I am. Because now, thirty years later, I am still warmed by the remembrance of that talk on a concrete step. With glacial force, it has carved the image of my father deep into my life.
My father’s voice was many things. And, it was different things at different times. Mostly, I remember a friendly and happy voice. It would be clear and stern when it needed to be, then suddenly forceful and serious in the wake of disobedience. He cooed tenderly with a baby. He prayed with reverence before dinner. He laughed out loud, especially at his own stories. And he could be heard all the way across the park when I tried to squeeze in one more at bat while supper waited. On this day, the voice I wanted to hear was that of hero. A hero here to slay the dragons in my life. Here to take away my hurt. His voice conveyed his calm and confidence, his understanding and patience, his resolve and determination. And in it I found, as I usually did, what a son needs from his father.
" . . . I get paid on Friday," he continued, planning and carefully picking each word as he went. "Let Mom and me take care of some things and maybe, maybe we can go see about a glove. I can’t make any promises, but we can try. Deal?"
"Deal," I sniffled. Then I wiped my eyes and nose on my shirt.
Dad and I went to the store that Saturday morning. It was either Dan-Dee’s Discount Center over on 45th, or Shopper’s World just north of Ridge Road. Probably Shopper's World --- better selection you know. Anyway, we bought a glove. As I recall, the price was about eight fifty. It was the finest piece of genuine, handcrafted, autographed, official regulation, leather equipment ever produced by the Wilson Sporting Goods Company. It was new, it was beautiful, and it was mine. It was a little stiff, but it was mine. It really needed to be broke-in, but it was still mine. In our neighborhood, as in all neighborhoods, the kid with the new toy or the new bike or new glove is King for the day. And I was King.
Eight and a half bucks and the story seems to end. But what I failed to hear in my father’s voice that day, and what now echoes my memories of youth, was his hurt. Because if I hurt, he hurt. And when he hurt, he hid it. When a father cannot slay the dragon, or worse, cannot take away the hurt, fathers suffer as real a pain as ever felt by the child. But a father hides the ache that smolders within his heart. Fathers swallow their tears. And tears are painful things to swallow. They burn in the throat and they tie knots in the gut. But, that’s what fathers do.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the fact that we got my new glove that day, probably meant he did without or he fudged the weekly budget to slay my dragon; to take away my hurt. My new left-handed baseball glove meant something very special to me back then. But it means much more now that I know more clearly the real cost and a little better understand that man.
When my son takes to the field to play baseball, he has his own glove. A right-handed glove, I must add. In fact, he has two. (See, you can’t play first with a fielder’s glove, and you can’t play outfield with a first baseman’s mitt. So . . . well, anyway.) Each is a glove more expensive than the glove my father bought me. They are more expensive than most mid-sized tool sets from Sears. Not only does he have his own glove, but aluminum and graphite composite alloy bats with high-tech grip. (I had a wooden one with electrical tape on the handle.) Batting gloves, cleats, batting helmet, the works. Oh, and gloves aren’t hooked over the handlebar of your bicycle anymore either. They’re carried in your specialized equipment bag with all the other essentials, like wristbands, ankle guards, and an insulated water bottle. (We drank out of a hose.) I wonder if they still flip for first pick.
I now live a thousand miles from that small park in Indiana, but it is a distance I can cross by closing my eyes. And now Dad is gone as well, but he too, is never very far. One always brings the other when memories come to visit. They will always travel together. The details of my youth, no matter how well remembered or how long forgotten, define the person I am today. That is true for everyone. There is a park, or big game, or a glove in everyone’s past. It’s how we got to where we are. The forces of the past shape and create the character and substance of the present as clearly as a glacier can form a ridge or make a lake.
The Glove
by Alan Dunn
I am left-handed.
Ricky Lynch was the only other left-handed kid in the whole neighborhood. We were fairly good friends, but not exactly best friends. We weren’t the "nothing-could-ever-come-between-us" best friends that Paul and I were. But this left-handed thing had forged a special bond between me and Ricky. See, Ricky had a left-handed baseball glove . . . and I didn’t.
I don’t remember why I didn’t have a glove like most every other kid on the block. It does seem to be one of the basic tools of boyhood, but I was without. If things were tight around the house from a financial standpoint, I never knew. If we lived by a strict budget, it never affected me. I do know that my parents didn’t just run out and buy whatever it was we kids wanted or thought we needed. Nor did we grow up expecting that they would. I do remember that there were plenty of lessons involving the fact that money did not grow on trees and other such noble truths. These lessons usually followed a lost toy or a torn knee in a good pair of pants. But then, all the moms and dads said stuff like that, and their kids had a glove. Maybe I just lost my glove. Well, for whatever reason, I was struggling through childhood less than fully equipped.
Most times, Ricky would allow me to use his baseball glove. We would share. Sharing a baseball glove presents one simple problem. Ricky and I had to be on different teams. As long as we could work around this requirement, all was well. At the end of each half inning, the glove was flipped from one lefty to the other, as one team trotted off the field in victory over the third out and the other team walked on arguing over whose turn it was to play short. This little exchange meant that Ricky’s glove was never idle, and that I could always play.
Ricky lived next to the park, near the ballfield. When he wasn’t playing because of supper or having to go visit Aunt Lil, I could just drop by and borrow his glove from the back step. Those were days when you could leave your glove or your bat or even your bike in the yard and not worry that it would be stolen as soon as you were in washing your hands. Those were better days. Anytime I needed a glove in order to play, I would rummage through the wire frame milk crate on his porch by the kitchen door. There I would find one well-worn left-handed glove. All in all, it was a rather reliable system.
I was getting to be eight or nine. Playing baseball in the park behind our house was how my friends and I spent nearly every waking hour between Easter and Thanksgiving. We took small breaks for things like school and an occasional meal. But for the most part, from nine a.m. till the streetlights came on, it was baseball. Even if there were only two guys in the park, one would "hit some" to the other. Three kids could play "500." Four could play Homerun Derby. Five was enough to have a real game with "pitcher’s hand out" and anything right of dead center is foul. If one of the two lefties was up, then right was fair and left was foul. In our neighborhood, having enough players for a decent game was seldom a problem.
The neighborhood, as I knew it, was really just one block. A clearly defined piece of suburbia that ran from where our street met Forest Drive at the stop sign, to the apartment building just before you get to 45th Avenue. The fence behind my house, and the eight other houses on our side of the street, bordered The Park. It had a legislated real name of some sort, but to us it was always just The Park. Years later, when I was in high school, the name of the park was changed to honor the first policeman in our town killed in the line of duty. The better days were passing.
Ten years before we moved in, the park, the whole town for that matter, was nothing more than a swath of truck farms. Acres of tomatoes, strawberries, beans, and corn. South of 45th Avenue, it still was. The town was as flat as a bean field. And our town was as flat as all the other towns that straddled "The Ridge." Some great number of years ago, a glacier had inched its way south, pushing and piling up terrain into the region’s only discernible feature, The Ridge. It’s a thirty-mile long high point that wouldn’t even be considered a hill outside the prairies of the Midwest. From there, the glacier retreated some five miles to the north where it melted and became Lake Michigan. The land runs from both sides of the ridge with an almost unnoticeable slope. There’s not a real hill or rise for fifty miles. Corn to the south, steel to the north. I could step into a farmer’s field from the end of our street. Or I could sit in the park and watch the night sky glow, as the heat and fire showed on the clouds above Inland Steel when they tapped molten iron from the belly of a furnace. Our suburban island, with its new houses and neatly planted maples and elms, lay between the rich farmland of Indiana and the industries and industrial cities that lined the shore of the Great Lake.
The Park was the centerpiece of my childhood. Seven and half acres of grass dabbed into the middle of a thousand three bedroom split-levels and raised ranches. Most were built with the GI Bill. The houses were not exactly alike, but were similar. The occupants were not exactly alike, but they too were similar. Nearly every father on our street had fought in Europe or the Pacific. There probably was not a ten-year age spread between them all. With few exceptions, each house contained at least three or four children, one black and white television that picked up four stations, hardwood floors, and an unfinished basement. Only two or three people owned a second car. Billy Taylor’s mom was the only mom that had a job. And nobody knew anybody who had ever been divorced. Those were better days.
When I was six, the park was just a field. Weeds and construction debris recreated the terrain of the Old West or war-ravaged Europe. It was the sight of many a fierce and savage battle, all fought with plastic guns. But then the town moved in. They graded it, seeded it, and planted trees that were younger than I was. Then a set of swings, a merry-go-round, teeter-totters, and a slide were constructed. The park came alive with an army of children at play. Most of the trees didn’t make it. Then the town got down to business --- the baseball field. In the same place where we kids had paced off a makeshift diamond for two or three summers in a row, the town built a field. A real baseball field --- chainlink all around, two hundred feet down each baseline, a real homeplate, a backstop, and a pitcher’s mound. And as if life wasn’t perfect enough . . . dugouts. Out-of-the-sun-into-the-shade, hardwood bench, honest to gosh dugouts! Those were great days.
It was a wondrous place and time to be a little boy. In our neighborhood (that stretch of street between Forest and 45th), boys outnumbered girls by a ratio of better than three to one. Over two dozen male children between the ages of five and twelve. It was definitely lop-sided, but it was glorious circumstance for the proliferation of team sports. The sport of choice was hardball. Every kid, every guy-kid, played baseball. Playing ball was an obligation of citizenship in our youthful social structure. It was the single most common thread that ran through our lives. Baseball was what we did. Ballplayers was who we were.
As soon as any two or three of us began to play, it was like a call to arms. Bluejean and while T-shirt clad 3rd and 4th and 5th grade boys came running. Those living next to the park bounded over fences with bats carried at the ready. Bicycles with ball gloves hooked over the handlebars coasted to their resting place near the third base dugout. Bats and whatever balls could be found were tossed in a pile for mutual use. And someone needed to find the brick we used for first base.
A ritualistic dual soon followed known as "flipping for first pick." It involved a bat and the two captains. The international rules governing such a flip seemed always open to some new interpretation. Often, Ricky and I would be the captains. (It solved that shared glove thing.) First pick bats last, always. Odd man, or any squirt not big enough or good enough to play, was usually the official catcher, until someone else showed up. An official catcher meant you were out if he caught a pop foul. It also meant a play at the plate. Otherwise, the runner goes back to third if the ball beats him home. Hey, rules is rules. Had Ricky’s glove not been there for me to use, I might have been banished to that "official" job behind home plate, struggling with a wrong handed glove and never getting to bat. A fate worse than summer school.
It was never too hot to play, it was seldom too cold, and only the moms seemed to be bothered by lightning. As long as Ricky’s glove was available, my ball playing days were endless. Not having a glove of my own was never much of a problem, until . . .
It was a big game of some sort. Some challenge or something from the creeps in the next block. I don’t recall all the details, but it was an us-against-them kinda thing. Ricky and I could not be on opposite sides. One of us would not get to play. Ricky’s patience had run out. "Go buy your own dumb glove!"
It was me that didn’t get to play that day. There was nothing to do but go home, dejected. Hurt by friends, left out of what was maybe the biggest game of our lives, and hating the unfairness of life for having been born a southpaw. It suddenly mattered that I didn’t have my own glove. It was suddenly the most important thing in my life.
I was sitting on the back door step when my father came home from work. I sat where I knew he would stop to take off his work boots before entering the house. The car would stop in the driveway at 4:20, give or take seconds. He was a man that deviated seldom from the day-to-day routines that bounded his life. My father was not perfect, but he was consistent, and tonight he was right on time. He set his lunchbox and Thermos bottle on the concrete and settled in next to me. Silently he unlaced his heavy boots. He knew something was wrong and that I was waiting for him. Waiting for my dad.
He smelled of steel, welding, and hard work. There was an outline of clean around his eyes and the top of his forehead where hardhat and goggles had shielded him from his dirty and dangerous work. Ironwork. Skilled labor. Hard labor. My father built things. He built buildings and bridges. He worked in the mills and refineries that lined the lakeshore. A union man. He framed the steel roof on the new school gymnasium and he climbed the skyscrapers of Chicago. It was very hot work, then it was very cold work. It was always dangerous work. I never knew a day when he did not leave the house before the sun was up. If baseball in the park defined who I was, then work and providing for the family defined my father. That was what he did. That was who he was. But now he was home, and he knew that I hurt.
Tears inched down my face, as I explained the tragic end of my life, here at nine. And how a baseball glove, or rather, the lack of a left-handed baseball glove, had caused such devastation. He listened. With his powerful hand on my shoulder and his scratchy unshaven cheek resting on my forehead, with my tears making patterns on the walk, he listened.
"I’ll tell you what . . . " he started. His voice cut through my sobbing and sniffling. It cut all the way to whatever places hold the definitions of who and what I am. Because now, thirty years later, I am still warmed by the remembrance of that talk on a concrete step. With glacial force, it has carved the image of my father deep into my life.
My father’s voice was many things. And, it was different things at different times. Mostly, I remember a friendly and happy voice. It would be clear and stern when it needed to be, then suddenly forceful and serious in the wake of disobedience. He cooed tenderly with a baby. He prayed with reverence before dinner. He laughed out loud, especially at his own stories. And he could be heard all the way across the park when I tried to squeeze in one more at bat while supper waited. On this day, the voice I wanted to hear was that of hero. A hero here to slay the dragons in my life. Here to take away my hurt. His voice conveyed his calm and confidence, his understanding and patience, his resolve and determination. And in it I found, as I usually did, what a son needs from his father.
" . . . I get paid on Friday," he continued, planning and carefully picking each word as he went. "Let Mom and me take care of some things and maybe, maybe we can go see about a glove. I can’t make any promises, but we can try. Deal?"
"Deal," I sniffled. Then I wiped my eyes and nose on my shirt.
Dad and I went to the store that Saturday morning. It was either Dan-Dee’s Discount Center over on 45th, or Shopper’s World just north of Ridge Road. Probably Shopper's World --- better selection you know. Anyway, we bought a glove. As I recall, the price was about eight fifty. It was the finest piece of genuine, handcrafted, autographed, official regulation, leather equipment ever produced by the Wilson Sporting Goods Company. It was new, it was beautiful, and it was mine. It was a little stiff, but it was mine. It really needed to be broke-in, but it was still mine. In our neighborhood, as in all neighborhoods, the kid with the new toy or the new bike or new glove is King for the day. And I was King.
Eight and a half bucks and the story seems to end. But what I failed to hear in my father’s voice that day, and what now echoes my memories of youth, was his hurt. Because if I hurt, he hurt. And when he hurt, he hid it. When a father cannot slay the dragon, or worse, cannot take away the hurt, fathers suffer as real a pain as ever felt by the child. But a father hides the ache that smolders within his heart. Fathers swallow their tears. And tears are painful things to swallow. They burn in the throat and they tie knots in the gut. But, that’s what fathers do.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the fact that we got my new glove that day, probably meant he did without or he fudged the weekly budget to slay my dragon; to take away my hurt. My new left-handed baseball glove meant something very special to me back then. But it means much more now that I know more clearly the real cost and a little better understand that man.
When my son takes to the field to play baseball, he has his own glove. A right-handed glove, I must add. In fact, he has two. (See, you can’t play first with a fielder’s glove, and you can’t play outfield with a first baseman’s mitt. So . . . well, anyway.) Each is a glove more expensive than the glove my father bought me. They are more expensive than most mid-sized tool sets from Sears. Not only does he have his own glove, but aluminum and graphite composite alloy bats with high-tech grip. (I had a wooden one with electrical tape on the handle.) Batting gloves, cleats, batting helmet, the works. Oh, and gloves aren’t hooked over the handlebar of your bicycle anymore either. They’re carried in your specialized equipment bag with all the other essentials, like wristbands, ankle guards, and an insulated water bottle. (We drank out of a hose.) I wonder if they still flip for first pick.
I now live a thousand miles from that small park in Indiana, but it is a distance I can cross by closing my eyes. And now Dad is gone as well, but he too, is never very far. One always brings the other when memories come to visit. They will always travel together. The details of my youth, no matter how well remembered or how long forgotten, define the person I am today. That is true for everyone. There is a park, or big game, or a glove in everyone’s past. It’s how we got to where we are. The forces of the past shape and create the character and substance of the present as clearly as a glacier can form a ridge or make a lake.