Babe Ruth’s glove, 1926
Sports Saturday
Here’s a lyric that makes my heart sing, perhaps because I recently spent time with my two-year-old granddaughter Esmé. Even though she’s younger than the girl in the poem, I saw the same sense of wonder at the world.
“Pasttime” seems to be about baseball but then, when one probes further, it becomes a poem about growing old and bridging the years between generations and sensing infinite possibilities. In some ways it reminds me of James Leigh Hunt’s poem “Jenny Kissed Me.” But first to the baseball poem:
Pasttime
By Emilio DeGrazia
A girl, nine years of wonder
Still on her face,
Stands directly on the bag at third
Running amazed fingers along the wrinkles
Of my old leather mitt.
It is the bottom of the ninth,
And everywhere in the world
The bases are loaded.
Baseball gloves are like totems, acquiring ever more significance with each passing year. Think of them as adult versions of the velveteen rabbit. I remember reading years ago a baseball player’s description of his glove—maybe it was Brooks Robinson, maybe Cal Ripkin—and I was struck by how he kept patching it together rather than acquiring a new one. It had that kind of meaning for him.
In this case, the glove is an extension of the speaker and the little girl is fascinated by it, running amazed fingers along the wrinkles, perhaps as she is fascinated by the speaker (let’s say he’s her grandfather). She sees the glove as more than an aging piece of leather and suddenly, through her wonder, he sees himself as something more than an aging piece of leather. It doesn’t matter than he is in his ninth inning.
The title is wonderfully evocative. Baseball is (or was) the national pastime and, along those lines, he and the girl are just passing time. But the speaker, initially, is feeling old, as though he is past his time. Then, however, he is taken back to a past time by the girl’s sense of wonder. For a moment, he has passed time and entered a new realm. Everything seems possible.
And now for the James Leigh Hunt poem:
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
Actually, this creeps me out a little. I like DeGrazia’s poem better.
