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Lindsay Metcalf
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The smell of fried bacon reminds me of springtime.
And springtime is the start of baseball season.
As long as I live, I will fondly associate those three things – bacon, baseball, and spring. And here’s why…
When I was a young boy, my father taught me a little trick to get my trusty baseball glove ready for action after a long, dry winter.
That trick started with the frying of bacon.
My mother used a heavy, cast iron skillet to fry bacon. When she was finished, she would lug that pan over to the sink where she kept an empty orange juice can. Very carefully she would pour off the bacon grease into that can and return it to its place on the drain board.
After a couple of hours the bacon grease would cool and coagulate. My father showed me how to dip my fingers down into the can and scoop up some of that grease and rub it right into the palm of my baseball mitt. He taught me how to work it deeply into the grain of the leather and how to bend and twist the fingers back and forth. I performed this little ritual every day for about a week until that mitt was soft and flexible.
When you’re playing defense in baseball and you’re crouched down waiting to field a ground ball or running to catch a pop-fly, the last thing you want is a rigid glove; otherwise the ball will smack that mitt and bounce right out. What you want is a glove that is an extension of your very hand, one that is pliable and snaps shut when it’s supposed to – like a Venus Fly Trap.
I have vivid memories of standing out in the field on hot summer days and catching a whiff of bacon grease wafting up in the humidity. And it seems strange to admit it now, but the smell of that grease was somehow oddly comforting to me.
There was someone else in our house who loved my baseball glove nearly as much as I did – our family dog, Babcock. Whenever I would leave that glove lying around after practice (as I often did), I could be sure to find it clutched between his front paws as he sat licking the leather over and over and over. He never chewed on it; he just sniffed and licked every inch of it with a twinkle of ecstasy in his eyes.
That baseball glove served me well for many seasons until I foolishly left it out in a heavy rainstorm that ruined its lining.
Although I don’t eat much bacon these days, the smell of it brings back fond and fabulous memories of my younger, more flexible, more limber spring days on the baseball diamond.
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