Grey-haired, stooped Mrs. Thompson always wore a dark sweater when she gardened in the summer. I wouldn’t have noticed except she occasionally retrieved a “foul” wiffle ball from her garden’s crocuses and peonies, with never a scold.

Her backyard bordered the driveway we shared with our neighbors, the Bartoski’s, with their garage serving as the backstop and our garage the pitching mound. An ancient, bowed wire-link fence served as the left-field foul line.

Like many major league baseball players in the fifties and sixties, I had an off-season job as a newspaper carrier for The Daily Times. Mrs. Thompson was one of my 44 customers, which meant on every Thursday evening, I would collect a weekly sum.

As a proper business boy, I carried a small three-ring notebook with a page for each client, containing perforated stamp-sized receipts. For change, I attached a coin changer to my belt.

Collecting gave this impressionable 12-year-old access to the early evening lives of adults other than my parents. Most invited me into their living rooms, including Mrs. Thompson. As far as I knew, she lived alone. My mother told me her husband had died years earlier.

I remember her front room was always warm and dark, with the shades down on each window. Once, it must have been late summer, early evening, she took me through the house to her kitchen in the back, with side and back windows that looked over the garden that bordered our play area.

I don’t remember what she said or what kind of cookie she offered. But I do recall the openings with rolled-up blinds that overlooked her backyard and our ballpark.

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