This is day four of my challenge to post a black and white image around the theme of the beauty of decay. Today I’m going to post two photographs. When I was a kid, baseball defined my life. From the fourth grade on, I played every day in the summer. When I wasnt at the ball field, I was playing baseball with my pocketknife (remember that?). On nice days I was out of the house racing to the Yatesboro baseball field where we would pick up games with anyone showed up. Usually there were enough guys to make up two evenly-matched teams. I didn’t have a glove of my own, so Jerry Hockenberry and I had to play on opposite teams because he and I were the only lefties. Since I was one of the youngest kids playing, it usually fell on me to hike to Minnie Connell’s candy store to get pop for everyone when we took a break. That was fine with me because it also meant I could take the bottles back and keep the 2-cent deposit from each. It represented the only money I had as a kid. When I was in 5th grade, Jerry Hockenberry got a new glove and I asked if I could buy his old one. That evening, I high tailed it to his house, weighted down by the pennies in my pocket. I counted out two hundred pennies and Jerry sold me his old glove. Talk about exciting! I was in seventh heaven. I played with that glove through ninth or tenth grade. The best part of the story is that I still have Jerry Hockenberry’s old glove and cherish it as much as my Peterson’s Writing Certificate. I pass this ball field in Snyderville at least once each week and every time I do, I think back to the kids who laughed and played on it and wonder if they had as much fun playing baseball as a kid as I did. This is the Go-Day-Tem baseball field. Since there weren’t enough kids in the towns of Gohenville, Dayton, or Templeton to field their own teams, they combined to form Go-Day-Tem and built a field in Snyderville to further confuse everyone. No one has played ball on this field for as long as I’ve lived around these parts. It’s kind of sad that fields like this lay dormant. I now challenge Keith Boyer to post a black and white photograph each day for the next five and to nominate someone else each day.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 19:12:47 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015