As you probably figured out by the title of this post, I’m a San Francisco Giants fan. Tonight I watched my team win their second World Championship in three years and the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about my grandmother.

I wasn’t always a Giants fan. In fact, in my younger days I was an Oakland A’s fan. I didn’t recently jump on the Giants bandwagon though. My conversion from A’s fan to Giants fan was gradual, it started about fifteen years ago when I started to spend quality time with my grandmother where we discussed everything from her stint in World War II as an Army nurse to her cross country trek from New Jersey to San Francisco in 1958 to begin her post war career as a nurse at a Veteran’s hospital. A trek not many women did alone in those days.

My grandmother, Beulah “Billie” Packard, was a Giants fan for most of her life. She told me quite frequently that she moved from the East Coast to the West Coast the same year the Giants made the move. She jokingly said she’d followed them.

Grandma Billie was, by her own admission, not an emotional woman. But she was passionate about the Giants. She watched or listened to each and every game. She kept a notebook where she logged each game and what the final score was. She prayed for a World Series and was devasted when the Giants lost to the Angels in 2002.

My grandmother didn’t live to see the Giants win the World Series in 2010, but she was on my mind that night just like she is tonight. How she would have loved to see her team reach the pinnacle of the sport.

As for me, I still have a soft spot for the A’s, but thanks to my grandmother, my heart is in San Francisco.