Mill Steet

Half-way between my house and 27 Autumn Drive was the minor league baseball field. It's where, as an official baseball player in town, I played all my little league games. One side of the field, past the right field fence, were the old train tracks, long out of service. Past the deepest parts of the outfield, beyond center and left field were woods. Across the gravel parking lot bordering the third base fence, the Quinnapiac River trickled and flowed under a cover of trees, charting its way through Southington like a ribbon in the wind.

The baseball diamond itself sat across the street from the old Peck, Stow & Wilcox Company, who donated the land to the town to make the baseball field. Deteriorating factory buildings could been seen across unused fields with overgrown grass. The company's trade name, Pexto, built a reputation in Southington as a prominent tinware manufacturer by the early eighteen hundreds, and worked in the area for over a century before changing hands multiple times in the last half of the nineteen hundreds, when most of the manufacturing jobs began moving overseas.

At my games at Pexto Field, Pop Pop would often come down and watch me play. In early Spring, he always wore his dark pants, shiny black jacket, and beige panama-style hat--which he wore everywhere. As I played at my position in the field, or between swings when I was up to bat, I'd look over to the fence behind my team's dugout and see Pop Pop wathcing me and Grandma smiling and waving. Most of the time, though, I couldn't wave back, baseball players don't do things like that. They don't wave to their family five time a game, they don't stop and smile for pictures, and they don't cry.