THE BASEBALL GLOVE

 

 

      The hurt caused when I heard my father speculate in whispers to my mother about me was nothing compared to the hurt I suffered that day after school when I found a new baseball glove on my pillow where Mr. Peeps should have been. 

I knew my mother had finally lost the argument with my father--my doll was gone.

 

Alone there in my room--my haven from a world suspicious of a delicate boy who didn't like sports--it was like I'd been stabbed in the heart, and all my bones seemed to go soft as I collapsed in a helpless heap on the bed.  Being an only child, a solitary boy, Mr. Peeps was the one to whom I could tell everything, things I had no one else to tell.  I wanted to hold my doll, squeeze him tight until I didn't have anymore strength left, for holding him against me always gave me a feeling of happiness, though a happiness I didn't understand, a feeling of happiness that words could never explain.

     Late that night I lay awake in the dark listening to my mother and father's voices saw angrily against each other until my father lost his temper and hit the dinning room table with his fist.  After that my mother's voice faltered, sounded weary.  She was afraid of my father, we both were, and she changed the topic to the weather.  I clutched the pillow where Mr. Peeps should have been, knowing I would never see him again, and felt a pain greater than any my father's fist had ever caused me.
    

    The first morning of summer vacation I spent working in my mother's garden.  I always liked the way the flowers seemed to gather around me like beautiful little people waiting for me to care for them.  There with the blossoms, the toad that lived beneath the fiery mums, the zooming bees and breeze-sailing butterflies, I didn't feel so isolated from all other living things, could almost forget how lonely I was without Mr. Peeps, but by noon father had ordered me--in that barbed wire-sharp voice he reserved especially for me--to spend time with my new baseball glove.

     I was in the front yard tossing a hardball in the air and catching it when I noticed a boy walking down the sidewalk had stopped.  A baseball glove on his hand too, he looked at me with such a long intense stare that I felt a shock of realization, and when he smiled my heart thumped so hard it frightened me.  He held up his glove and I threw him the ball.  It was then that some secret sense delivered a message, and I glanced back at the house. 

 

My father was watching me through the screen door, and now thankful for my new baseball glove, I held it up and shouted, "Thanks, dad!"  His eyes hardened, anger disfigured his face, and in a brilliant flash I knew why. 

 

But I would be who I was, and I turned away from my father's anger--unafraid, not hesitating--and stepped toward the smiling boy who waited for me, knowing that when I held him against me I would understand the feeling of happiness.

 

The feeling of happiness that words could never explain.
 

 

S.D.J 04/25/2007