If I really strain – if I close my eyes and think back, I can summon my earliest memory. It is this: I’m standing in the backyard throwing a baseball back and forth with my father. I’m maybe 3 feet tall, and the glove is ridiculously huge on my hand. And yet the ball lands there perfectly every time, as my grinning father tosses it to me with great care.

From nearby, the Sox game is crackling from a transistor radio on a picnic table. The smell of newly mown grass is high and sweet. A cicada buzzes like electricity from a tree. I am a 3-year-old with chubby legs, and I’m hypnotized by the thuck and thuck and thuck as the ball hits leather. Hits it again. And again and again. A conversation between father and son in the language of baseball.

Thuck and thuck and thuck.

He died when I was 6, and there was no more of that. In the scrapbook of memory, there is that one perfect day and then nothing. There is no more of that backyard baseball so perfect, it’s like poetry. There is no more communication between us at all.

There was a big brother, but the sound of ball hitting glove wasn’t the same. It was somehow savage and competitive. Perhaps my brother was angry that he had to play with a smaller, weaker boy in the backyard.

I don’t think about that part very much. But every summer, when some heartless bastard mows his lawn and I smell the sweet grass, I miss that one sweet memory. You never forget your first.

Thuck and thuck and thuck.

Oh, how I love baseball. If I could be so passionate about all things in my life, I’d be the perfect husband, the perfect worker, the perfect man. My life should be divided into innings and ruled by things like pitch counts and scoring position. If the rest of my days could come with the smell of the glove and ball, I know they’d be happy ones.

I almost never get reflective and sappy. I find such immersion in memory counteractive to the pursuit of better days. I don’t think of my father at all unless some chemical or event inspires me to introspection. And when I do, it’s that one memory only. Ball slapping leather. Buzzing insects and static from the radio.

I grew up in a neighborhood where your station in life depended precisely on your baseball ability. Even the gangsters played ball. They’d rob stores in the evenings, take their spots at second base in the afternoons. They’d throw double play balls to choir boys, and we all were equal as long as we were on the diamond.

The rich kids had spanking new gloves from Grants. The poor kids had battered-looking things handed down from older brothers, or from the second cousin of a friend of the mean guy your mother worked for. As long as you showed up with some form of leather on your hand, you could play.

I was a fast son-of-a-bitch. I was skinny and sort of twitchy, but as long as I got on base, I was as good as a run on the scoreboard. In the field, I was Golden Glove material. Brother, nothing got by me. You could fire a ball at me out of a cannon and I’d come up with it, in my teeth if necessary.

It sort of bothered me, as a boy, that I never had a father in the stands to watch my prowess. Not too much, mind you. I played with a tough crowd and long, sad looks at the bleachers would get you beaten. But sometimes, you know. Sometimes …

I never had those giant dreams of making it to the pros. Never. I wanted to be a lot of things, but a pro baseball player was never one of them. I lacked bulk, for one thing. I couldn’t swing for the fence. When I stood out in the backyard throwing a ball onto the roof, I wasn’t dreaming of my place in Fenway Park, I was dreaming of that hazy memory of the past with my father.

Funny how I realized that just now.

All of my memories seem to be connected to baseball. All of the good ones, anyway. Baseball comes with you through the years, even when friends and good fortune depart. Baseball never goes away. It’s not like that girl you fell in love with, or the brother who took off drunk in his car. Baseball comes back to you no matter what.

When I get depressed, I pick up a baseball and sniff it. I swear I do. It links me back to happy memories. I love the game, all the nuance and romance of it. I want to be at third base right now, robbing you of a single by snatching up that hard drive down the line. Run all you want, boy. You’re out at first and the ball is going around the horn.

I miss my childhood, I suppose. I miss my father and that long-gone memory of thuck and thuck and thuck. I miss all those punks I used to play ball with. I miss my brother, too.

I can get some of it back, a small part, when I sniff the glove or the ball. I can get it just by hanging around in spring when selfish wretches mow their lawns and that green aroma scents the air again.

I don’t know how we live without baseball in those long, dark winter months. The game is about tenacity, overcoming great odds, heroic rallies late in the game. Baseball is about giving it all you’ve got and running as fast as you can, no matter how far behind you might be.

I hope when I die someone thinks to bury me with a glove so I can smell the leather into eternity. Carve red stitches onto my tombstone and write: Here lies Mark. He had a ball.

Mark Laflamme is a Sun Journal crime reporter. He still has his older brother’s glove.