My aunt and my grandmother came to visit me for a few days this summer when the Nats were on the road. While I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to bring them to one of our games, my Red Sox were visiting the O’s, so I got in touch with a former coworker that now works up at Camden. He owed me a favor (I had gotten him two seats for the Strasburg debut!), so he set us up in an outfield suite for the weeknight game.
I have to preface this story: My grandmother, who raised me, is a singular human being. My friends like her more than they do me. She knows all the gossip about who is seeing who, who’s coming home for holiday break, etc. She was on AOL Instant Messenger back when that was cool and spends a good portion of her time now on Facebook. She’s the best person I know and I wouldn’t be where I was today without her.
Anyway, I don’t know why it never dawned on me to take her to a game before (we have a 10-game package with the Red Sox), but as I watched her go to her first game in more than 30 years, I felt like the Grinch when his heart grew three times the size. I remarked that it felt like Christmas, but I couldn’t figure out why. It was that feeling you get around the holidays that just seems to fill you from the inside. I couldn’t shake it.
While she’s not a huge sports fan, my grandmother has always tried to care about the things that we did, and she cheered at (mostly!) apropriate times. As much as none of us wants to admit it, she’s getting older and probably couldn’t have sat through the whole game if she hadn’t been able to go inside the suite at times. I felt so proud that I was at a point in my career, in my life, that I could share something like that, something I cared so much about, with her. And I realized that moments like this are why I do my job.
I want other people to feel the way that I did that day. Whether it’s pride, whether it’s love, whether it’s just enjoying a night out at the Ballpark with the people you care about most. Baseball, for me anyway, is about tradition, and family. It’s timeless in the way that it transcends generations. And the fact that I got to share that with the person who is most important to me in the world, tells me that I’m on the right track. That I must be doing something right. Sometimes, especially when you’re on the business side of something you love, you can lose sight of why it mattered so much in the first place.
My grandmother gave me baseball back that day.
I’ll add that to the growing list of things I owe her for.
