JEFFREY KARP

KARP--Jeffrey. Jeffrey Randall Karp. My relationship with my father often revolved around baseball. And by God, we would talk baseball until the end. For us, baseball always had two key lessons at its core: (1) Baseball is timeless, constant; (2) baseball is molded by fathers and sons, just as fathers and sons are molded by baseball. I know baseball is timeless because I am still at Game 6 of the 2009 World Series. My dad and I arrive four hours early, to get a glimpse of batting practice in the sacred month of November. We wear our tickets around our necks like nervous freshmen anxious not to lose their dorm keys. Our seats in the second level, obstructed by the foul pole and thousands of New Yorkers, too long overdue for a championship to sit. Jeter, Pettitte, Posada, Rivera, all long past their prime, take this new and strange field to complete their mission. No need to put unnecessary drama into the mix, the Yankees comfortably take care of the Phillies, 7-3. Matsui finds himself as the MVP, but I am more impressed with the stalwart man who had stood next to me for every second of the last nine innings, with a mind encyclopedic enough to answer every trivial factoid my mind could fathom from the long history of baseball. The Yankees were perfect, the air was perfect, and you, dad, were perfect. I didn't know then that my dad's mind was deteriorating. I didn't know he would slowly lose access to his higher functions, his speech, his sight. I didn't know I wouldn't be able to go to him for cogent thought when I applied to college, got my first girlfriend, picked my major, got my first job. All I knew was my dad and I saw the Yankees win the World Series, and that we loved each other. That was the last time the Yankees played in a World Series game. I always wanted to go back to the next one with my father, but it never happened. It is better this way. I know the next World Series wouldn't have been this fairytale, only possible from the mind of a son not yet aware of his father's mortality (or his own). It would have been like the last game we went to. A Mets game, routed by the Dodgers, 14-4. My dad unable to eat a hotdog without me wiping his chin of copious mustard, unable even to find the hotdog stand not 20 feet from our seats. A pleasant time, but painfully obvious that he struggled to keep track of the score. His body barely a sack of bones as I guide and drag him to the 7 train. No, we never made it back to the World Series, so that game will stay preserved, untouched by time and disease. It will always be that special November batting practice. We will always be standing behind the foul pole. The Yankees will always be winning, 7-3. I will always love my dad, and he will always love me.