LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the memoir "My Glove" by Katherine A. Powers (©2008 by the Creative Nonfiction Foundation).
My oldest personal possession is my baseball glove, which I bought for eight dollars at Woolworth's in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1960, when I was almost thirteen. It was a "modern" glove in that it had shape3, unlike the ancient specimens I came across in my grandfather's house that looked as if they'd been fashioned for trolls and exhumed from a bog. My glove had-has, I should say-1a good deal of rawhide lacing. Its metal eyelets number twenty-five. The strap's black nylon label boasts a "W," which might stand for "Wilson," except it doesn't. The glove's inside surface sports another beguiling "W," as well as "Style 2681" and "[illegible] Set Pocket." I can't remember what sort of "Set Pocket" it was. Deep, I'd say. The inscription has been flattened out of existence by almost fifty years of service.
I bought this wonderful thing secretly, because my father had met the few remarks I'd made about "thinking of getting a glove" with his rote response: "You don't want that."2 (Other things I "didn't want" were blue jeans, a bicycle, a penknife, a fishing pole, a permanent wave, and a pet of any sort.) A baseball glove? What would I do with it? Who would I play with? Boys at school? I was a girl. And what was I going to play with? Not a hardball: we were not having anything to do with hardballs. That's how people got their teeth knocked out and the next thing you knew there'd be a broken window and 'I'll be out there doing my act with the putty knife.'
For a week or so I fraternized with my new glove on the sly. Behind the closed door of the room I shared with my younger sister, I cradled my glove and pushed my face in it, inhaling the deep, fertile leather smell it pumped out.8 I kneaded it, shaped it, and slammed a ball-a brand-new baseball-in it. Outside the house, around the corner, out of sight, I found a clandestine battery mate, the wall of a brick college dormitory that had no windows on the lowest story. The glove activated all the baseball boilerplate I had amassed from incessant baseball-book reading. Confronting the wall, I flicked off the sign, looked in for another, slapped the glove against my thigh, wound up, and poured one in. Sometimes (if the wall was hitting) I cupped my knee with my glove, waiting for the batter to try to punch one through. I snagged the ball, pounced on it, speared it, whipped it home.
I walked around (out of sight of the house) with the glove tucked under my arm, wishing I could shove it in my back pocket like boys did in books, but of course my pants, when I was allowed to wear pants, had no pockets because my mother had made them.9 I wished I knew where to get neat's-foot oil, not available at Woolworth's, but no one I could confide in knew anything about that. Another thing I could not do, I might as well confess, was spit in my glove. I could direct the occasional spitting noise at the pocket, yes. But shoot a gob of spit right in there and work it in like you read about? No, I couldn't.
I brought the glove to school, placing it beside me on the old-fashioned bench seat, on top of my books--just like the boys did. In that distant day, or perhaps only in that parochial school, the boys and the girls were not allowed to play sports together at recess, and none of the girls had gloves. But we did play softball and my glove had no problem at all handling the larger sphere.5 It could handle anything.
Soon enough, unable to keep my love object to myself, I came clean with my parents. Fairly clean at least: I kept the hardball under wraps, nestling a tennis ball into the glove's pocket10 in a prissily responsible manner. I told my father I thought I better tell him I'd gotten a baseball glove. It was a really good one. He massaged it with his thumbs, sort of churning them around in the glove. The leather seemed okay, he allowed, but he said he didn't see why the glove had to look the way it did. He whapped his fist in it a few times and then took it with both hands and bent it back and forth as if to reprimand it for the affectation of its deep pocket.6 He entered briefly into the subject, familiar to all baseball-book readers, of infielders sitting on their gloves to keep them flat so they could turn the ball over fast. I said I knew about that.4
He said, "Is this the best you can do for a ball?" I told him that actually I had bought a baseball, but that I only used it against the side of the brick dormitory--you know the wall that doesn't have any windows low down you could accidentally hit.7 He said that's how you ruin a good ball, leather gets all nicked. I said that was true.