Julie and Michael Lisi are from Willoughby, Ohio, but these days they spend most of their time in Jupiter, Florida. And then they visited a thrift shop down south one day in 2018, she found something that shocked her.

You never know what you’re going to find in a thrift store, but a memento from your son’s childhood is a real surprise.

Little League glove, Big League find

As the couple wandered the store for about 30-minutes, ready to leave empty-handed, an item caught Julie’s eye. It was a baseball glove.

But when she looked at it a bit closer, she was brought to tears.

The couple immediately called their son Christopher.

Now in his 50s and teaching math in Ohio, he’s always been into sports. He coaches the football team at the high school where he works, but baseball was his game growing up.

“Even before he could play, he’d go out and play catch with his dad,” Julie said.

An All-Star discovery

In 1978, Christopher was an All-Star player on a team that made it to the semi-finals. The 12-year-old has a special memory of that game because he came in to pinch-hit and ended up hitting two home runs to lead his team to victory.

If you need proof, his parents have it recorded on their 8mm camera, complete with the post-game celebration the involved swarming Christopher on the field and taking him off the diamond like a hero.

“Another guy was on base and I caught another ball and it went over the fence and two home runs later, it was just surreal,” he told WBNS News.

But in all the excitement, Christopher lost his baseball glove. It would have been a great memento.

The search was over

He looked for the glove as soon as he noticed it was missing but had no luck.

“The next morning when I woke up, as soon as the sunlight came up, I got on my bike and just rode as fast as I could,” Lisi said said.

In fact, he never even told his parents he lost it.

But the old glove had Christopher’s name on it in marker, so no one could have mistaken it for their own.

Christopher always wondered what happened to his glove, especially since his dad has his own childhood glove proudly on display in the family home.

An unlikely find

In the thrift store that day, what Julie saw out of the corner of her eye was her son’s name written in marker.

40 years later and over 1000 miles away, there it sat.

“My eyes just happened to glance at it. It didn’t really register. Things were whirling in my mind. I could see the name Christopher Lisi written down it. That is when I thought it is his, but it really didn’t seem possible,” she said.

When Michael came over to his wife in the store he noticed she was shaking and clutching an object.

“I thought something happened and she turned the glove over and right down the side I could see it.”

Julie then snapped a photo of the glove and texted it to Christopher. He responded immediately: “buy it.”

The cost of one man’s piece of history – just $1.49. But to the Lisi family, it’s priceless.

“He was thrilled, he was jumping up and down. He just said, ‘Mom, bring it home.’”

Christopher said he plans to pass on the glove to one of his sons someday.

To this day, no one knows how the glove ended up in that Florida thrift store and how it got there from Ohio.

Some things are just meant to be.

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Source: New York Times, WBNS News