There are two stains on Allie’s Bill’s catcher mitt. One of them is a diagonal, light green streak, courtesy of wet grass. The other one is this old, brownish-red looking blob from a bop on the head with the baseball. Catchers hardly ever have anything to do with themselves, so bill mad his mitt a little more interesting. After getting tired of looking at the tiny, baby stitches running along every edge of the backwards glove, he started to write poems all over the thing. There were so many words and poems on the glove, they sort of mushed together and looked like one big pattern all over the place. Some of them were real cute rhyming poems that just made old Bill smile, but some of them were quite deep. I couldn’t even understand what some of these guys were talking about all the time. I mean some of them were really short like, the one that went,
“One Flower
On the Cliffside
Nodding at the canyon”
Seriously though, even though I don’t know what this guy meant, I could tell that it was pretty deep. It had to be if it was on Bill’s glove and it didn’t rhyme or anything. You see, Bill would get bored out in the field, as I was saying before, so he would write all those poems so that he could have something to read and keep occupied and all. He didn’t care much about using the same color pen or anything, so the whole thing was pretty colorful. I think he liked it that way though, because he would even write with purple pen. I mean, how does a young kid even find purple pens anyway? That’s the kind of crazy stuff he’d do. He liked that old mitt all cluttered up with purple, blue, red, etc. poems and stuff. After a year, or so, I don’t even know how he could still read all those poems. The thing that happened, was, all the ink started to run into each other and it didn’t even look like words anymore.
I figure that, by that time he must’ve had those poems pretty much memorized. I mean, there’s only so much you can fit on a catcher mitt, so after reading that stuff all the time, it’s gotta get stuck in your mind. Bill was the type of guy who always liked that Walt Whitman guy. Yeah, he really liked old Walt Whitman, what with all the stuff about eagles and perfume; it was pretty simple for him to memorize that sort of stuff.
Man, you really could hardly see all those poems anymore. The mitt was all cracked and beat-up looking. It always flopped closed because it was used up and Bill would stick it under his bed near every night. Even though it was old and all, it sort of looked kind of gorgeous with that purple pen all over it. I don’t think it would be nearly as beautiful without the stupid purple ink; I mean who really wants to look at plain old black pen poems scribbled over a catcher mitt. It looks like any phony could have done it to make it look like he was intelligent; the purple pen just goes to show that Bill didn’t care about what other people on the team were thinking. I figure that’s what old Bill liked best about it though. That colorful mitt would’ve probably been enough to get him through all those games, even if he didn’t understand what all those poems meant, but he did, naturally.