It’s not about where I live. It’s about what lives in me.

When people ask why I—a lifelong Oregonian—care about the Chicago Cubs, there are the easy answers I freely give, and the “it’s complicated” answer I rarely give. Easy to talk about where my folks grew up, but how to describe a tender and steadfast place in the human heart where a baseball team has lingered throughout five generations of our family’s history?

My parents and three grandparents were all born and raised in Chicago. But the fourth grandparent, my mother’s dad—he came to America, to Chicago, in 1908. We know what year that was: the last time for a stretch of 108 years that the Cubs won the World Series. What was it like for an 11-year-old immigrant boy at the end of a 5,000-mile odyssey from Poland’s Wissa River valley, to be enveloped by that spectacle? We only know it spawned lifelong fandom in him that permeated his left-coast grandchildren by osmosis.

My brother and I knew from our earliest awareness of baseball that Cubs fans have a special kind of stamina. Across more than half a century, I can still see and smell the stands at Wrigley Field, a child’s-eye view from where we sat with our grandfather during our special-occasion visits to Chicago. Doubleheader! Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Billy Williams, Lou Brock! The Cubs would turn a great play and Grandpa would hoist his cigar on high and crow, “Howdaya like them apples!” Or tell us sagely, in those days before instant replay, “The tie goes to the runner” and “A foul-tip into the glove is a live ball.”

And I can still see Rocky in the stands behind us one memorable game, a bright-eyed elder fella languidly draped over the bench, shouting personalized critiques at the umpires (“Not again! Ya did that in the Phillies game in April!”). Rocky downed beer after beer after beer without ever getting up to pee, and without ever any sign of being drunk. Everyone around us seemed to know him, and Rocky knew not only every player, but every umpire by name, and remembered every call each one had ever made. The beer vendors treated Rocky with the affection of an old uncle. Beer after beer. Just before the seventh inning stretch, my eight-year-old curiosity got the best of me. I turned ever so slightly to sneak a peek under Rocky’s seat, my eyeballs cast so far sideways in the sockets, they hurt. Where I expected a dark puddle, there was nothing but dry concrete and a montage of empty cups. When Rocky took himself out to the ball game, out with the crowd, he didn’t need peanuts and cracker jack and he certainly didn’t seem to care if he ever got back.

From our well-established life in Oregon, my dad adored his Cubs from afar, thanks to WGN. My kids wore their Cubs hats everywhere. Dad took my oldest son on a continuous circuit of every baseball card shop in the neighborhood, year after year, asking for Cubs pitcher Charlie Root and catcher Gaby Hartnett.

“I didn’t know who Charlie Root was,” recalls my son, a child of the 1990s more interested in Ken Griffey, Jr. and Randy Johnson. “But I sure knew that Grandpa wanted that card pretty badly.” Through years of searching, Dad never told his grandson why.

We finally did find out who Charlie Root was. I won a vicious battle for that elusive card on a zippy new internet auction site called eBay, my finger hovering over the bid button as the seconds ticked down and the price climbed. “Charlie Root,” my now thirty-something son relates, “was the pitcher who gave up Babe Ruth’s famous ‘called’ home run to center field in the 1932 World Series. Charlie’s practically a member of our family now.”

It was just like Dad not to mention why he maintained a lifelong loyalty to Root: Charlie got a bum rap. One sensational story—a dubious one at best—shadowed Root to the end of a renowned 16-year career capped by his being named the all-time Cubs right-hander in 1969. The Babe himself agreed that Charlie got a raw deal. Peter Golenbock’s 1996 book Wrigleyville includes this quote from Ruth, telling Cubs equipment manager Ed Froelich: “I may be dumb, but I’m not that dumb. I’m going to point to the center field bleachers with a barracuda like Root out there? On the next pitch they’d be picking it out of my ear with a pair of tweezers.”

My dad was all about the guy who was misunderstood, misrepresented, overlooked, underrated. Charlie Root remains a legend in our family, his 1926 card still propped on a bookshelf, his gaze steely and taunting. Do I look like someone you want to mess with? A century later, his visage remains that of a man unimpressed with his era’s equivalent of trash talk. He still holds the Cubs career records in wins, games, and innings pitched.

And my mother, daughter of that immigrant boy with the Cubs-logo red running in his veins. Long widowed, the day came when she no longer watched the games on WGN, no longer seemed to care, couldn’t care for herself. As she slipped deeper into dementia, it grew harder to get a reaction to anything from her. Even the photos and news of family that used to delight her often elicited nothing.

And yet.

On November 5, 2016, I arrived at her care facility at noon. She wasn’t up yet, but the staff bustled to get her going. It took a long time, distressed sounds coming from behind the door. When they finally wheeled her out, she looked at me with no recognition, then stared past. But I plunged ahead, telling her I had great news. No reaction. I took her hands in mine and said, “Mom. The Cubs won the World Series!”

Those vacant eyes suddenly fizzed like sparklers. “CUBS!” she yelled at stadium volume, bringing staff running from all directions. They’d long told me that the earliest memories are the last to go. In that moment, was Mom in the stands with her dad, root-toot-tooting for the home team? Her eyes flickered when I told there were five million people at the celebration parade. Then she faded out.

I ordered several Cubs World Champion t-shirts for her. Staff told me they opened her closet every morning and asked what she’d like to wear. She wordlessly pointed to the Cubs t-shirts, every day, until she could no longer lift her arms enough to get them on.

My grandparents, my parents, my brother—the folks whose love of the Cubs shaped my own—are all gone now. But on November 1, 2016, I clearly heard my grandpa’s voice after Addison Russell’s World Series Game 6 grand slam: “Howdaya like them apples!”

Holy cow, I like them apples a lot. Their seeds hit me where I live.

Ellen Notbohm’s work touches millions in more than 25 languages. She is author of the acclaimed novel The River by Starlight, and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction appear in many literary publications and anthologies in the US and abroad. She is a former Little League Head Umpire and mother of a former Little League umpire.