My Poppa was the baseball fan I wanted my dad to be | GUEST COMMENTARY

In 1980, doctors diagnosed my poppa with cancer. I visited him shortly afterward in the Manhattan apartment he shared with my nanna. I was 28, recently married and feeling marginally grown-up.

“So,” I said, aiming to be upbeat despite his news, “did you hear about the Yankees today?” We always talked baseball — which player hit a home run, why so-and-so struck out too often.

“Yes,” I expected him to say and then to confirm with specifics the close call on a player sliding into home plate that the ump got wrong, or whatever.

But no. Instead, he waved his hand with dismissive disgust. I got the message. He had cancer now. Cancer had eclipsed everything else in his life, even baseball.

I’d never seen cancer in action. But this much I immediately recognized: If he’d given up on baseball, he’d probably also given up on living.

Benjamin Sheft had come to the United States from Russia in 1909, at the age of 2. Once, in his Eames chair in the den, he reminisced about the village in Russia where he first lived.

“I still remember what it looked like,” my poppa told me. His voice was a whisper and he squinted, as if to peer far into the past. “At least I think I do,” he added with a throb of longing. “Seems like yesterday.”

in 1928, he became the first member of our family to graduate from college. During the Great Depression, he went door to door to businesses — dry cleaners, auto-repair shops, anything — offering, as a newly minted accountant, to do the books.

Eventually, much later on, he lived a version of the American dream. He co-founded an accounting firm. There, he prepared taxes, bank records, payrolls, you name it.

In time, he bought himself a Cadillac, then the standard all-American symbol for financial success. Then he bought another Cadillac, and yet another, treating himself to a new model every year or two. My grandparents moved into a new apartment building in a more fashionable neighborhood. They vacationed with friends in Europe and Asia. They joined a country club, where my poppa played golf, smoked cigars and savored his Scotch.

My poppa took me to my first baseball game, at Yankee Stadium, in 1960. My own father had long since lost interest in baseball. He had no clue, in any given October, which teams were competing in the World Series. He was too busy with work to pay attention to a game that I ranked as more important than breathing.

When it came to baseball, my poppa became the father I wanted my dad to be.

Now he lay in a hospital bed. This was a few weeks after he wordlessly acknowledged his loss of interest in baseball. I’d come to visit him and sat by his bedside.

He’d lost weight, no longer broad in the shoulders and thick in the chest, but, rather, a diminished facsimile of himself. He’d gone pale, too, all the color flushed from his cheeks and brow. He reclined with his head on a pillow, an IV in his arm. Lights flickered on a monitoring device nearby quantifying his health status.

He had cancer of the throat, and he was dying, and he knew it. The look on his face said as much.

My poppa, who could whack a golf ball 200 yards with absolute brutality, who sent his son to Yale Law School, who bought his daughter a $21,000 house in 1954 with a cash down payment, who once seemed so powerful, now seemed so vulnerable.

And then he died. He was 74.

Yet he lives on. He lives on in the photo of him, then about age 25 with his whole life still ahead of him, that I keep on a dresser in our living room. He lives on in the overcoat I inherited from him and wear to this day. He lives on in a poem I composed as a letter to him, imagining our final conversation in which I got to say everything I wanted to tell him, most especially thank you.

Benjamin Sheft lives on in our first-born child, too. Two years after he died, my wife and I had a son. His middle name is Benjamin.

Bob Brody (bobbrody@hotmail.com) is a consultant and essayist living in Italy. He is the author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”