The Summer of Loving Baseball (Short Story‪)‬

Ever since his Bar Mitzvah earlier this year, my grandson Josh comes to my apartment by himself after school on Friday. In the hope of trying to bridge our ever-enlarging generational gap, I treasure the moments I have him to myself before his parents join us for the traditional Sabbath meal. This was particularly so last Friday since he'd been grounded for a week for going to the movies with his friends instead of going to Hebrew school and I wanted to cheer him up. Toeing the ancestral line is as much a problem for Josh as it once was for me. I had just finished setting the table when I glanced down at the floor in the living room where he was sprawled out reading--what else?--the sports section of the New York Times.