Anybody Seen My Baseball Glove?

Every Spring, around this time, I have a strong desire to re-acquaint myself with my baseball glove.  

It's not that I'm preparing to play in that pickup league again on the Esplanade across Storrow Drive from Massachusetts General Hospital. Hell, it's been so long since I lived on Beacon Hill that I'm not even sure there IS a pickup league on the Esplanade any more. And anyway, I've lost a little something off my fastball.  

Still, that visceral need to put on my left-handed Wilson A2000 has become overpowering right now, in late March, less than two weeks from Opening Day. 

I remember exactly when I bought my first real baseball glove. Of course, I'd had several gloves as a kid, each one a kid's model of one sort or another, inexpensive and bought for me by someone else, but this was the first one I'd bought with my own money. Grown-up-with-a-full-time-job money. And I wanted the real thing, just like the major leaguers wore. The Wilson A2000. The experience of buying it is still vivid in my memory, because it was the afternoon of the night I watched Hank Aaron break Babe Ruth's home run record on national television. Some things you just don't forget. 

Problem is, I can't find the glove. When you live in the same house for a long time, you inevitably go through multiple Spring cleanings, which in my case usually involve ruthless disposal of anything I can't justify keeping at that moment. Now, I don't remember deciding to dispose of my glove during one of those ruthless pogroms of years past, although the leather had probably degraded over time and it's possible i might have said to myself  "I'll never use that thing again" and stuck to my "touch something one time only and throw it out or give it away" rule, if you can't see yourself ever using that something again. That might have happened. But I don't think it did. 

In any case, I've done a preliminary search of the basement, and no glove. This is not good. But I shall undertake a more thorough investigation soon, and report back.  

I want to rub some neatsfoot oil into the leather and experience that new-season feeling once again. And maybe go outside and look for someone to play catch with.