TO SIR, MITT GLOVE

  You may believe this is Summer we're in right now, but at my house it's Glove Season; this means round-the-clock baseball glove activity. Mostly the action takes the form of an ongoing glove-smacking parade, which you can catch from many vantage points. There's almost no bad place from which to view it. 

  Some like to watch from a couch, or a chair, but my favorite spot for parade viewing is the kitchen counter, the same place where I used to read the newspaper each morning. I still like to stand with the paper open under me, but it's just for old times' sake. From this spot the visuals really pop; you can easily see the tween pacing around the room, regularly pounding the glove with a baseball that's been duct-taped onto a bat. And you really feel like you're part of the action, too; because of the room's famous acoustics, you can hear the contact of ball and leather as if it's right next to your head. 

  And by the way, if you decide to drop by during Glove Season, don't make the mistake of using the word "mitt" out loud. You're likely to trigger a longish lecture from the Parade Master about the difference between a mitt and a glove. In my younger days, I once made this mistake myself. Ah, youth! I often chuckle to myself at how naive I was back then. 

  The mitt lecture I received was notable for its impatience, but also for a kind of deliberate gritted-teeth quality one might adopt when explaining what stop signs mean to a village idiot. While that wasn't exactly enjoyable for me to experience, it was like conversing with a Wal-Mart greeter compared to the wall of hostility I encountered a few years back, when I mistakenly referred to a soldier's helmet as a "war hat."