In baseball today, fielders use gloves that could double as bushel baskets. They’re enormous. Anyone could catch with them.

When my brother Bob and I were young (I was six, and he was eight) we only had one baseball glove. It was a fielder’s glove that had no webbing between the fingers. When Bob and I would play catch, he would pitch and I would catch; I had the glove, and he had nothing but his hands.

He could throw really hard.

We told our dad that we could really use a catcher’s mitt. We lived on a rural hilltop at the time. Our backyard was barely distinguishable from a large field behind our house, a field that extended some acres down into a wooded area.

My dad wasn’t happy with this yardscape. He told Bob and me that if we cut the grass back some distance (30 feet?), he would buy us a catcher’s mitt.

For the task ahead, we weren’t without tools. We had an ancient, rusty, push mower. It was hard to push across the gravel driveway to even get to the yard, so early on we abandoned it. Instead, one of us would use a hedge clipper, and the other would use a scissors-like device with one blade that would pivot back and forth against a stationary one. It didn’t occur to us to try to sharpen either tool.

We set to work hacking and clipping away at the grass, trading tools as needed. Bob favored the hedge clippers, so I was often left with the other device (I think it’s significant that I can’t remember what it’s called). We developed blisters and aching backs.

There came a point when we thought we were more finished than not. As our work proceeded, our dad made little comment about our overall progress or the lack of it. Days went by, then a week.

Then one day, as Bob and I were lounging on the living room floor reading comic books, our dad came home from work. Without comment, he tossed a sack into our immediate vicinity. In the sack was a black, plasticky J.C. Higgins catcher’s mitt. It wasn’t a deluxe, genuine cowhide model. As I recall, our response was “Sell our clothes, we’re goin’ to heaven!”

That catcher’s mitt changed my life. Bob could still throw hard, but now I was much less exposed to bodily injury. I could catch just about anything. I still can.