By Daniel Dunaief
My wife and I have visited with another couple, whom I’ll call Ben and Jill, several times through the years. We’ve attended sporting events and chatted at meals in different cities.
They are both pleasant and agreeable and seem pleased to reconnect with us each time.
Recently, we had an unhurried dinner where the stories went from the routine to the sublime.
Jill is worried about her second son, who is working incredibly long hours and doesn’t seem to have much, or any, work-life balance.
Her husband Ben, who is in a similar line of work to their son, worked incredibly long hours in the first years of their marriage, too.
Indeed, back in his day, Ben would work all day, come home to take a shower while a car service waited outside and then would return to work, without so much as a meal or a rest.
“I wasn’t as worried about Ben,” she said, as she spent her waking hours taking care of three children who required her considerable attention.
Like many other parents of children in the 30-ish range, Jill is eagerly waiting for her oldest son, who has been in a relationship for years, has purchased a house with his girlfriend and shares custody of a dog, to take those next steps that would not only net her a daughter-in-law but would also bring her grandchildren.
“Honestly,” she shrugged, “I thought I’d be a grandparent by now.”
Speaking of grandparents and grandchildren, Jill shared that her grandfather died last year at the age of 105.
Doing quick math, I realized that he was born the year before the Spanish Influenza of 1919 and died after the end of Covid, which means that he was one of probably a select few who lived through two pandemics in different centuries.
He had served in World War II in Washington state as a code breaker and was a widower for the last few decades of his life.
When her grandfather was 90, he needed heart surgery. Doctors wouldn’t normally perform such a procedure on a 90-year old, but they said he was much more like a typical, healthy 80 year-old.
They put a device in his heart that was supposed to last 10 years. When her grandfather reached 101, the device faltered and he had sepsis. This, the family thought, could be the end of his long life. He rebounded, however, and lived another four years, enduring vision limited in part by reduced visits to the ophthalmologist during Covid.
The conversation turned to baseball, as Ben and Jill are avid Mets fans.
I told them my memories from Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, when I was living in the Boston area and was surrounded by giddy Red Sox fans on the verge of their first championship since 1918.
Ben’s eyes lit up and he told us that he and Jill attended Game 7 of that series.
No, they hadn’t purchased tickets. They knew two people who had worked at Shea Stadium as vendors, but hadn’t worked in a while. They borrowed their vendor badges, which didn’t have their names or pictures on them, arrived at Shea two hours before the game started, and casually walked through the gate.
When they sat down in left field seats, a security guard asked them what they were doing there and they said they worked at the ice cream vendor in left field. The security guard informed them that there were no ice cream vendors in that area. They considered leaving, but instead hid in a stair well until the crowds came in.
They found an usher who allowed them to sit on the concrete steps — empty seats were unlikely in a winner-take-all game — and watched the Mets come back to clinch the title.
Whenever anyone asks Ben to share something people don’t know about him, he relates the story of their bold and successful effort to watch live the last Mets team to win a World Series.
