Gloves, an Memoir

Posted on | December 20, 2009 |

In our household some articles are common property, as I suspect is the case in many homes. Warm hats, scarves, gloves - all are there on a first-come first-grab basis, and no one seems to mind as long as one doesn’t look too ridiculous in the aftermath.

This was not the case when I was a boy, where each of us was expected to know exactly where his or her articles or warm clothing were, and be responsible for them, and if yours went missing you were doomed to do without.

So, I was out shoveling snow this afternoon and realized that I was wearing a very old pair of my father’s gloves.  He’d insisted I take them not long before he died, even though they were too small for me and I knew that he was finally going against the family dictum concerning gloves.  I accepted them, of course, even though they were, well, too small. Then, today, those too-small gloves that were hard to squeeze into came into their own.  Looser gloves would have caused my hands to rub against the leather, and my teacher’s soft palms would have quickly blistered as I labored away.  These gloves, however, didn’t do that.

When I came back inside, proud of the tottering snow banks I’d constructed, and peeled off the gloves I noticed this tiny detail. No blisters. In the final round-up the old dad had been right to insist I should take his fine, too-small pigskin gloves. I wouldn’t mind betting he knew exactly how useful they’d be in this circumstance. I could almost feel him looking over at me with a wink that said, ‘Told you’.

It makes me wonder how much else of his good advice, that I didn’t think was good advice at the time, I’d ignored over the years….

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