A Part of Him

I remember his flaming red hair, how much he loved baseball, and of course his mitt. The one we got for him on his eighth birthday, when we walked in to the sport equipment shop, my older brother, Charlie, and I. My older brother and I had been saving up, had put both of our allowances together for three weeks to buy Charlie a birthday present. And when we had asked him what he wanted he answered without even thinking about it. “ A baseball mitt” he told us. So we walked in to almost every sport equipment store we knew looking for a lefties baseball glove. We searched all afternoon and were about to give up when we stumbled upon a small sports shop near Yankee Stadium.  We walked over to a shelf full of mitts. We looked for a few minutes until we finally found one for lefties at the back of the shelf, hidden by all the others.

Ever since that day he carried the mitt and a green pen around with him everywhere and wrote poems on it. He wrote on every finger, on the palm, and on both sides. “ So I can read when it gets boring out on the field” he said when I asked him why. Now, the mitt is old and it feels like Charlie has had it since forever.

The leather is worn down, soft and flimsy. No longer tan but khaki and even white in some areas. The green letters, thick from being traced over and over and over again whenever they began to fade away. The words, in his neat handwriting, lined up carefully across all of it. The poems separated by dots. Poems, with words and phrases so powerful they can make you want to cry. The string that holds the flaps together, the string that started off white, now almost black because of the dirt.

Its all there, changed by the years, but there; except for Charlie. He is missing. He passed of leukemia in 1946. I was about thirteen when it happened, when he died. I remember I slept in the garage that night. I remember I broke all of the windows with my hand, smashed them to pieces even though it hurt like hell. I smashed them, just because I felt like it.

I miss Charlie. I miss the way he laughed until he fell off his chair. I miss his red hair that I could see from a thousand yards away. I miss watching him play ball. I miss him; but his mitt will always be with me, and his mitt was a part of him.