Yer Out!

When I was a boy, probably not long after I left diapers, my father gave me a Spalding baseball glove of the old style, a regulation size and weight baseball and a small can of neat's-foot oil. The oil, which was to be applied liberally to the baseball glove, would make the leather pliable and suited to my hand. It would allow me to grasp a pop-up or flyball or snag a grounder out of the dirt.

I say the glove was of the old style because it was closer to the gloves of the 1950s than the gloves of the 1960s or '70s. The whole affair was not much bigger than my hand itself and the fingers of the glove were, like mine, short and stubby. 

Still, the deep pocket (I broke the glove in well) was emblazoned with Whitey Ford's signature--and in the shadow of Yankee Stadium where I grew up, such a signature was second only to having a glove with Mickey Mantle's moniker on it.

As I got older and larger, I quickly graduated from my Whitey Ford Spalding into a sleeker, trimmer and more modern Wilson with Ron Santo's signature on it. This, to my ten year old's eyes was not dissimilar to the leather wielded by actual pros. I cherished the glove like an ingenue her diamond ring.

However, my older brother was also at play in the fields of the lords. Fred had moved up to the Mercedes-Benz of gloves. A Brooks Robison Rawlings model with basket-weave webbing that was literally twice the size of my Santo Wilson. Rawlings' slogan was "Finest in the Field," and most wise men believed that.

Brooks and his Orioles of Baltimore, in 1970 when I was twelve, single-glovedly defeated the powerful Cincinnati Reds team, and I just had to have a glove just like my older brother's. The glove cost literally all the money in the world--I think $35--and my father bought one for me on the condition that I would turn my two-year-old Santo model over to my younger sister, Nancy.

Growing up in a family of boys, Nancy took to baseball--to the horror of my mother and the prevailing gender norms of the day--much more readily than she took to Suzy Homemaker kitchens or Easy-Bake ovens.

Whereas Fred and I were fast-growing, Nancy was more earthbound. In those days, the big kids--me and Fred played the corners--first or third--and shrimps, squirts and peewees played the middle infield spots, second and short.

Boys and girls didn't often play sports together in those days. Not against each other, not on the same teams. But in summer camp, when I was 13 and Nancy was 11, I had already emerged as the big baseball cheese while Nancy played shortstop for the girls' camp. I guess once around the end of the summer the girls would play the boys in some sort of exhibition game.

I remember Nancy, built low to the ground and lithe, hoovering up grounders and zinging the ball to cut male batsmen down in this game. Nancy's hands moved like wild birds. With the speed and confidence of a well-honed magician on his way to making the black Queen sally impossibly through the deck and appear against all odds.

That was the last I played with Nancy. 

The genders pulled apart. Girls aged-out of sports. And I moved up to loftier horsehide echelons where we wouldn't be caught dead sharing the diamond with a girl.

Nancy would have been 66, on Saturday, Valentine's Day. She died in a motorcycle crash on Mother's Day in 2007. She was 47. The last time I saw her she lay on a slab in the New York City Medical Examiner's Office on First and 31st. He face was black and blue. Her beauty still there. Her dead smile still beatific. 

I could see her beauty through my tears.
I still can.
I always will.
I can still feel her hand in mine.
I hear her laugh.

Some time later I subwayed out to Brooklyn and cleared out her slovenly ground-floor apartment. It was a depressing wreck of a place and made me think that in someways, Nancy had reached her apotheosis that summer afternoon when she was 11 and showing the boys what for. 

Her old Ron Santo Wilson was in a closet. I scooped it into my bag along with just two or three of her belongings. The rest I Hefty-bagged and dragged to the curb. I have still a set of her motorcycle keys, a pair of her expensive eyeglasses and her glove.

The Santo glove sits in my New York apartment. It still looks well-oiled and ready to go. I suppose I could pass it along to my grandson, Jude who will turn four this summer. He's too young, really, for such an advanced piece of equipment. And he's too young to learn of Nancy, and death, and the sad that comes from life.

I will be heading back to New York from Connecticut tomorrow. My wife has things to do in the City as do I.

I'll check in on the glove while I'm there. I'll look in on it like a father looks in on a sleeping child. I'll think about bringing it up to our country house from Manhattan, so we will be closer--I don't have many artifacts like that old Santo. But I'll leave it where it rests.

It deserves its space. 
It's earned its peace.
It needs to just be.

Nice play, Nancy.
He was out by a mile.

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