Home And Family USA

There is something special about your first baseball glove. If you met me, you would not expect me to be a very big fan of baseball. I am not very athletic and I have never been very athletic. Being more of an egghead actually, I love math, chess and video games. As a matter of fact, on your average day I am more likely to play a baseball video game than play catch. There is one thing about my baseball glove that makes it so valuable to me that words can’t capture it, the connection it gave me to my father.

Playing catch is something that fathers and sons have been doing in this country for generation and it is something that they will continue to do for many more years. A baseball glove is a way for a young kid to bond with his father. My dad was a pretty typical American dad. He was kind of quiet and stern, and had a really hard time expressing his feelings. When we went outside together and played catch with our baseball gloves, I knew how much I meant to him. Baseball mitts and baseball in general is good for that. It can bring people together who would not be able to talk as freely otherwise.

My dad knew that I did not want to be on any baseball team and to his credit he never pressured me to join. All I wanted to do was to play catch with him and run around, as well as occasionally shoot hoops with my friends. My own kid is a lot different than I was at that age. He loves anything and everything that has to do with sports and I don’t know where he got it from. When I got him his very first baseball glove, he looked at me with the same look of joy that I gave my father when he got me one. At that point, I knew that he was really and truly my son, and I was his dad.

We would play catch every day that summer, him with his new, shiny baseball glove and me with my old, worn down one. It was usually a quiet time but it was always a lot of fun. I think that it might have been the best summer since when I was a kid.

I have been fascinated with world globes and maps for as long as I can remember. I think that it all started when I was three or four. I went into my father’s study looking for him. His study was a place that had always fascinated me. It was full of old, dusty objects that I did not understand. He had shelves and shelves of books, and I used to daydream about what could be in them.

My dad was always willing to explain things to me but when I asked about his world globe map, he demurred. He would not tell me what it was. He seemed to be thinking. Finally, holding it out of reach, he told me that it was a map of the world. I asked excitedly to see it, but he would not let me. Then he asked me a question. “What do you think the world looks like,” he asked?

I remember exactly what I said. I had a friend who had described an antique world globe map to me, dragons and all. Although I knew that one did not run into dragons every day, I was quite sure that they existed in the oceans, as well as on other continents. I began describing all the fantastic creatures that I believed existed on world globe maps. My father listened patiently, gravely even. He never corrected me. He never tried to dispel my illusions about maps of the world, nor did he participate in my game of imagination. He simply listened to me until I was done creating my fantastic world globe map.

When I finished, he took me into my own bedroom. He pulled out my box of crayons and said one word to me. “Draw,” he said, and smiled. I began to draw my world globe map. I was constantly frustrated by the fact that I could not include everything that I imagined, but nonetheless I continued. Soon I had an entire continent, then two. This was the beginning of my love affair with maps.

Since then, any picture of the globe that I see fascinates me. Rather than teaching me the shape of the continents and the layout of the world globe map, my father taught me something even more important. He taught me to use my own imagination and come to my own conclusions. He taught me that the world is a place full of wonder, even if that wonder does not show up clearly on every world globe map. It is a lesson I will never forget.