"Nothing you love ever really dies unless you let it."

[Bill Schenley]

Poppa, the World Series, and an undying love

Photo: http://tinyurl.com/mzoks79

FROM: The Long Island Newsday ~
By Bob Brody

My grandfather Benjamin Sheft and I walked side by side as the IRT
line rattled overhead. The afternoon sun cast shadows through the
railway tracks onto 161st Street. Vendors lined the street selling
baseball programs and pennants and photos. The aroma of beer and
peanuts wafted onto the sidewalks.

The historic building loomed over us. We passed through the Gate 2
turnstile. My Poppa kept his hand on the cusp of my shoulder to make
sure I'd stay alongside him.

We reached the upper deck in left field -- nosebleed city -- and I
scanned the panorama under the Bronx sky. I'd come to Yankee Stadium
on Sunday, Oct. 11, 1964, to see the New York Yankees play the St.
Louis Cardinals in the fourth game of the 1964 World Series.

The game started, and I felt so giddy that I turned to my Poppa. "I
wish this would never end," I said.
"Everything comes to an end," he said, smiling but obviously serious.

I had no idea what he meant. How could that be true? Everything will
last forever. Of this I was quite confident.

My own father had long since lost interest in baseball, too busy with
work to pay attention to a sport that I ranked with breathing and
eating. He once took me to a game at Yankee Stadium and somewhere
around the fourth inning, exhausted from his job, with cracked peanut
shells littered in his lap and some 50,000 vocal fans all around, he
actually dozed off, snoring away with Harmon Killebrew warming up in
the on-deck circle.

My grandfather filled in for my father on the baseball front. I could
always count on his attention and never needed to court his affection.
In this sense, he turned out to be the father I needed my father to
be.

"Everything comes to an end," my Poppa said 48 years ago. And for a
long time, I refused to believe him with all the brute will of an
innocent who knows no better.

But after my Poppa died of cancer at age 70 in 1981, I finally
believed him. The World Series game I saw with him came to an end (the
Cardinals won the game and the Series). The Yankee streak of World
Series appearances came to an end, leading to a drought until 1976, by
far the longest in team history.

The original Yankee Stadium came to an end, too, the hallowed
cathedral demolished before our eyes. The Bronx as we knew it -- the
Bronx where I was born and lived my first 28 months -- came to an end
by the mid-1960s. So, too, did my boyhood.

Then again, maybe my wish that everything will last forever has some
truth to it, too. The Yankees are still the Yankees. Baseball is still
baseball. And my Poppa will always be my Poppa.

After all, he loved me enough to take me to see baseball games when
baseball meant the world to me. I still wear his Swiss watch and, come
winter, his plaid woolen overcoat. I think of him often, all the more
when baseball season rolls around. Nothing you love ever really dies
unless you let it.