Your First Glove

A small memory, but a major one.

Wife is currently out of town, so I came home from a volunteer event last night and, while Air-Frying some chicken tenders (adulthood/masculinity), I was watching the end of Cubs-Padres and then the beginning of Yankees-Red Sox. While pretending to care about a MLB season that I watched six whole games of, and zero live this year, I came across this ad:

My dad died back on August 11, so I am now coming up on almost two months since that happened. My dad and I had an interesting relationship in that I loved him and I can only hopefully assume the opposite is true, but he was a different type of youth than I was. He was varsity in three sports, and I believe some publication somewhere named him the 1958 Nassau County Athlete of the Year. I was OK at sports, but varsity in nothing in high school. (I played some JV things and once, in 8th grade, I had 17 rebounds in a game, so suck on that. PS I’m very tall.) I think, looking back, that I got very into knowing about sports because I wasn’t actually good at sports, so knowing about it was a way to back-door the bonding because…