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.

Naps

Napping always seemed to be a part of 27 Autumn Drive. Grandma napped more than Pop Pop, slouching into the rocking chair after her soap opera or cooking show. Her eyes would be the first thing to give her away, drooping slowly until just before closing--and snapping back up reluctantly. Only seconds would go by before the process started over.

Before long her body would slouch, form a more relaxed position with then padding of the chair. Her head would fall to one side and lean into the front of her shoulder, pressing together the aging lines that crawled around her neck and forehead. The repeated dozing would soon win the battle. It never took long.

Pop Pop usually only fell asleep on the couch after eating. It would happen in the same way: the drowsy look, slouching, lethargically slow blinks preceding a leaned back head, propped up arms on a pillow and armrest.

On rainy days sometimes even I slept. Laying out below the TV, head propped up on a pillow, even my eyes drooped as I watched the rain dripping off the awning, the misty neighborhood behind.

Gone

Now that my grandparents are gone, existing only in what memories I happen to have of them, Autumn Drive just another average house in a middle class neighborhood on the west side of some forgettable Connecticut suburb, I'm forced to think back. Was there something special about it? All the summer days, all the time I spent there? What was it all worth it, my time with Primo and Josephine Pauletti?

Even when I was young, I thought about the day I would no longer have grandparents. Knowing that someday, far in the clouded future, that it was inevitable. I looked upon it with only a light stress, knowing it would be a salient mark to the end of a chapter of my life. Now that the page has turned, the chapter over, I don't feel any different than I did before they were gone. I wasn't swept up, transformed by some monumental internal change. If anything occurred within me, it happened with the subtlety of a ball of snow rolling down a mountain with the potential to start an avalanche.

And still I feel nothing significant. The only difference is realizing Pop Pop and Grandma are not there, not at Autumn drive, not anywhere. I'm reminded every time I watch the Discovery Channel or see games of bingo and I, for a split second, want to make a call or pay a visit. But there would be nowhere for that call to go, no one in the house to visit.

Poverty

The women there, he told me, like the ones in National Geographic magazines from the poorest parts of Indonesia, skulking around foraging for food with one hand, holding a baby in the other, would do anything for help. They were desperate.

"They'd run up along the train," Pop Pop explained. "And shoot their breast milk at the glass for the GIs. The guys got a charge out of it."

Pop Pop's head dropped a little, as if falling into some distant memory, "I always felt bad when they did that."

Is that something to be deeply sad about? It is for me, every time I think of the desperateness, the utter despair those moms felt. The inconsolable situation those people were in, caught in the middle of some other people's war. The war may have been in their backyard, but it wasn't theirs. It came from a far-away, unknown place, and they watched it happen helplessly, unable to influence it in any way, like ants watching a giant foot destroy their excavated dirt mounds sealing off their homes below.

"It must have been like another world over there," I said.

Pop Pop agreed.

The Box

One evening as I visited, Pop Pop brought out 'the box.' The infamous box of his past, with all kinds of 'odds and ends,' as he called it, from years ago.

The wooden chest, no bigger than a shoe box, sat on the island reflecting the round kitchen light off its amber-colored top. Pop Pop flipped up it latch and opened it slowly. A thin blue wire attached the hinged top to the side, so the top would stay propped open without swinging too far backwards.

I sat accoss from him and watched as he sifted through his old things. His eyes lit up when they met something he'd long forgotten about: old hunting permits and older report cards, the way they would when he saw an old, forgotten friend.

"This here," he said, lifting out a small, brown roll of plastic material with a button in its center. "This was the sewing kit the Army gave us."

He handed it to me. It was heavier than I thought. I unclipped the button and unrolled it. On the inside of the roll was a felt cloth riddled with all kinds of needles and pins. The base of the little roll held a thimble and two rolls of thread, one black, the other white. This is what he carried during WWII, I asked myself? Only the essentials, Pop Pop once told me. He continued to sift through the contents of the box.

The Kellers, Continued...

One time, Mr. Keller came inside my grandparent's house to talk about something with Pop Pop. Staring at the unique sight for 27 Autumn Drive, the new visitor, I noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The silver-haired old guy I always observed from afar looked the same--only closer, complete with round head, big thick glasses, a long sleeve plaid tee shirt with a puffy orange vest and jeans.

From my spot on the end of the couch, I peered into the kitchen. Pop Pop sat at the island talking to Mr. Keller standing somewhere near the stove. From where I was eavesdropping, I couldn't help overhearing the neighbor's new plans. He wanted to build a garage off the side of his house, out toward my grandparents' side.

Pop Pop wasn't bothered by it in the least. What did it bother him what his neighbor did in his own yard? Apparently Mr. Keller just wanted to run it by him and gauge his opinion.

The next time I heard about the building of the garage, my mom brought it up in the car, on the way back home a few days later.

"Now Nancie and I have to go to some hearing because Grandma doesn't want it built," she said.

"How come she doesn't want him to built it?"

There were a bunch of reasons: loss of privacy on that side of the house (the rose bush side), it would cast more shade in that area, obstruction of the view down the street from the master bedroom window Grandma never looked out of--but now planned on doing every day. Grandma pointed out a couple more things. The shed near the Kellers house had to be taken down to make room for the addition, the illegally built shed that never would have been okayed by town hall. Also, the fact that the Kellers had a garage once, on the right side of their house, like 27 Autumn Drive, that they converted to living space.

"So now they're going to have two driveways?" Grandma complained.

Within months the neighbors did, in fact, have two driveways, their old one, the tar that went right up to the right side of their house, and the new one, the one for their new garage. I thought their house looked good afterwards, but Grandma remained passively bitter, especially when Mrs. Keller stopped chatting with her about the roses or the marigold out front.

After the addition went up, and Mr. Keller stopped acknowledging Pop Pop when he worked in the yard or inspected the garden, I kind of felt bad for Pop Pop. He enjoyed talking with Mr. Keller. That's what guys do, talk about man things. Aside from Uncle Chet, what other guy did he have to talk to in the area? And the garage went up, Mr. Keller got what he wanted. After that minimal amount of fighting, brought on only by my Grandma, Mr. Keller won, what else was there to prove? Did he think Pop Pop was lying when he said he'd have no problem if he went ahead and built it?

I felt bad because I watched Pop Pop in the yard, stuck in an awkward situation, look over at Mr. Keller on multiple occasions and want to talk, like the old days, say some grown-up comment that would spark a conversation about football or fertilizer. Now he was lucky if he got a curt 'hello' in return. Really lucky if Mr. Keller returned a wave.

The Kellers

My grandparent's neighbors further down Autumn Drive, the Kellers, seemed like nice people. They were younger than my grandparents by many years, but their children had long since moved away, making them pretty old by my account. They always kept their yard looking trimmed and neat. Mulched flower beds, painted wooden wells, in the backyard near the woods, in line with their screened in porch, an ocean-themed shed, complete with giant, fake anchors and little brown nets hanging like spider webs on the side of the little gray building.

Mr. Keller and Pop Pop would talk often at the border of the property, at the backside of the garden, under the pine tree, along the walkway to the back yard. They always seemed to talk about the same old things: how the garden was doing that year, how bad the bugs were, how often the squirrels stole from the pear tree or the rabbits ate from the green beans, and how hot the days were, especially with the humidity.

Pop Pop told me once about a time before I was born. Mr. Keller came over and asked for advice on what to do with the water problem in his back yard. Every time it rained, his backyard became a mud hole. The rain, along with the septic tank, wasn't working together to make a satisfactory backyard.

"I told him to go ahead and get a couple loads of dirt, " Pop Pop described. "Raise up the yard a bit."

It made sense and apparently worked. Mr. Keller never had a problem since. The story explained why, at the back of their yard, the ground dropped a couple feet in elevation as it leveled out with the woods. Pop Pop recalled the story fondly. It seemed to me he was glad he though of a way to fix their problem, glad he could help.