January 11: Allie's Baseball Mitt, Green Ink, Poems Today

The thing was, I couldn't think of a room or a home or anything to describe the way Stradlater said he had to have.  I'm not too crazy about describing rooms and houses anyway.  So what I did, I wrote about my brother Allie's baseball mitt.  It was a very descriptive subject.  It really was.  My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt.  He was left-handed.  The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere.  In green ink.  He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat.  He's dead now.  He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946...

Holden has never gotten over the death of his brother.  In fact, his unresolved feelings over Allie probably motivate a lot of Holden's actions throughout The Catcher in the Rye.  They certainly motivate his eventual breakdown.  Holden loved Allie, the way he loves his little sister, Phoebe, who appears at the end of the novel.   Kids are true.  Kids are honest.  There is nothing phony about kids.  Allie's baseball mitt, with its green poems, sort of embodies Allie's innocence.  Allie was supposed to be playing baseball, but he thumbed his nose at the competitive nature of the sport.  Instead, he spent his time in the outfield reading his favorite poems.

Today, my daughter got an unexpected present:  a day off school.  A freak rainstorm blew into the Upper Peninsula overnight, and it was just too icy this morning to send out the buses.  It's a kid's dream--a three-day weekend with no homework.  On top of that, I'm taking my daughter to Green Bay on Sunday to see Shrek the Musical.  It's a belated birthday present.  I know when she finally drags herself out of bed, she's going to be really excited.

On this P.O.E.T.S. Day, I'm remembering those surprise gifts from Mother Nature, waking up in the morning to find out I had 24 hours of freedom ahead of me.  The world was usually white as a sheet of paper, just waiting for me to pull on my snow pants and boots.  Then, out into the blizzard I would go to write my poem.  Soon, the drifts and banks were composed into stanzas of snow people and forts and sled runs.  It didn't matter whether the wind was erasing my poem as quickly as I wrote it.  I just kept on writing until the entire backyard was some kind of Greek epic with witches and goddesses and sea monsters and sirens.

The world is sheathed in ice right now; the tree branches, encased in icicles.  It won't last long.  The temperature is already climbing.  Soon, everything is going to be slush and mud.  For the moment, however, there's this moment of frozen possibility.  Like Allie's baseball mitt, everything is poetry.  A baseball spinning and spinning against a blue sky.

Care to join Saint Marty in the outfield?

Holden and Allie's mitt