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Grampa Godino says he doesn’t have a first name anymore. It used to be Charles, technically still is, he contends. Charles Godino, professor of mathematics, Brooklyn College. But to Megan Ajello and her younger sister Erin he’s Grampa, and that’s how he introduces himself. 

“Hi, nice to meet you I’m Megan’s Grampa.”

This is a hot, sunny July afternoon on a nice tree-lined Staten Island street, a half mile or so from the Prince’s Bay railroad station.  Quiet, middle class suburban neighborhood here. Single family homes, two-car garages, basketball hoops, neat front lawns here. Hedges and flower gardens and bicycles leaning on kickstands here. And today all these Yankee baseball players, famous models, reporters and television cameras are here too.

In front of the Ajello home, Megan’s selling lemonade with a smile. Megan has a big, incredible smile that spreads across her face readily and often. Big smile, big tank of lemonade in front of her, little sister Erin working the register, although everybody thinks she’s the big sister because of how willingly and attentively she assists Megan.

Megan is seventeen and has cerebral palsy, which affects her motor functions, and scoliosis, a severe lateral curvature of the spine. The palsy makes her muscles tighten. There are painful spasms and her knees keep her up nights in agony.  In 2010, she had her sixth major surgery resulting from her condition. It was a rough one, a spinal fusion to straighten her back. Two titanium rods were inserted, thirty-seven pins. Before the surgery, the scoliosis had forced her into a hunched-over position, and that had reduced the amount of space in her chest needed for normal breathing. If her lungs had weakened, which was the inevitable upshot, she’d have become an almost certain candidate for pneumonia.

This is Megan’s sixth lemonade sale to support the Special Olympics, meaning she’s been doing it since she was a young girl.  Megan loves to fundraise for causes like the Special Olympics. Another she’s helped on a regular basis is the Cross Road Foundation, a group formed to assist women and families experiencing unplanned pregnancies. There are others too. The YMCA, March of Dimes, the American Cancer Society.  She has a special affinity for children, especially disabled children, Grampa points out. It’s natural, because Megan herself is disabled and has been in a wheelchair since childhood.

Megan had taken months to recover from the spinal surgery, and the healing had been problematic. There are lift and sling systems in her home to help her get around, but the doctors had advised that her parents, Dan and Linda, take strict precautions until she’d completely healed. It wasn’t easy for anyone, most of all Megan.

But that’s behind her now. Today, Megan is smiling behind the lemonade stand the New York Yankees grounds crew built and delivered to her door that morning, selling a whole lot of lemonade. Probably more than usual, since there are more than the usual number of people around.

It’s HOPE Week, an initiative that’s become an annual labor of love for everyone in the Yankees organization from top down. HOPE standing for Helping Others Persevere and Excel. It’s all about honoring people who’ve done exceptional acts of goodwill toward others, often surmounting tremendous challenges themselves. Each event comes as  a surprise to the honoree, not so different from any other surprise party in premise, except it’s thrown by the most famous baseball team on the planet earth. Since they have a few resources and connections here and there, it gives them the ability to do pull some doozies.

Earlier this morning it was knock, knock, hello, I’m Brian Cashman, with the New York Yankees, and my friend here is Scooter the Holy Cow, who’s a mascot with the Staten Island Yanks, and we have a little something for you. The something was Megan’s new lemonade stand. The old one, her father says, had seen better days. She’d really needed a replacement and here it is.

There’s also a dunk tank. Megan had wanted a dunk tank at her last lemonade sale. This time she gets it, hello, surprise. And as the party gets going, you have Cashman being dunked, and Megan’s dad, and then A.J. Burnett the Yankee pitcher, who’s  borrowed a bathing suit from somebody somewhere across the street, being sent down into the water by his kids. At some point Bald Vinny, the guy who leads the roll call from out in the right field bleachers at Yankee Stadium, also goes splash. He’s shown up with one or two dozen of his famous Bleacher Creatures, including Tina, Queen of the Creatures. Tina says she’s honored to be here and wants to be dunking Vinny herself before it’s all over and done, even if she has to cheat and push the target with her hand instead of hitting it with the ball.

There are other Yankees around. Thanks to New York traffic, they arrive in spurts, but they’re around. Players Robinson Cano, Andruw Jones, David Robertson, and Boone Logan. Coaches Mick Kelleher and Rob Thomson. And then Burnett, the dunked.

Grampa Godino eyes Cano as he arrives. A devoted Yankees fan, he’s been anxious to see the Yankee players. Truth be known, he’s been anxious to see them even when he wasn’t supposed to know they were showing up, or for that matter have even the foggiest clue the Yanks had anything to do with the lemonade sale. That’s why he’s come all the way from Florida, where he and Grandma were on vacation.

Grampa had it figured out almost from the get go, although only Megan’s parents were supposed to be in on the surprise. A couple of weeks before, his daughter Linda had phoned him down in Naples to say there would be a big shindig on July 28th. She wouldn’t tell him what kind of shindig, except that it would be a fundraiser.

“Why the twenty-eighth?” he’d said after a peek at his calendar. “It’s a Thursday. Who’s gonna come to a lemonade stand on a Thursday?”

“Well,” she replied, “the sponsor has an open date.”

The phrase open date raised Grampa’s antenna. For a baseball fan, it has certain connotations. Open date, in the summer, if you follow baseball, means your team isn’t playing that day.

Grampa pressed his daughter over the telephone. “Who is this sponsor?” he asked.

Linda wouldn’t tell him.

“Who is it?” Again.

She really, really couldn’t tell him.

Meanwhile, Grampa Godino was looking at the Yankees season schedule on his desk, and seeing that July 28th happened to be an off day. An open date. Righteo.

Being nobody’s fool, he told Linda okay. Your mother and I will come back to New York for the fundraiser being held by this mysterious sponsor that likes weekday lemonade sales. 

The thing about Grampa was that he’d already missed what ought to have been the biggest baseball event of his life. Once upon a time, growing up in Brooklyn, he’d been a Dodgers fan. Then in 1957 they went to the West Coast, and that was the end for him. At that point he figured he had to either switch to the New York Giants or the Yankees, and since his wife had been a Yankee fan forever, he became a Yankee fan.

But two years before that, in 1955, when Grampa was still a Dodgers fan, the Boys of Summer had won their first World Series championship -- the only one they would ever win in Brooklyn -- over the Yankees. The series had gone seven games, and pitcher Johnny Podres had won Game 3 and Game 7, the latter a shutout, to become the first MVP in World Series history.

And where was Charles when that happened? In Indiana, getting his advanced degree, was where he was. Going to graduate school, was where he was. He missed it, and his wife, and her brothers, the Yankee fans, were happy that he wasn’t home in New York with them. He was calling them up on the telephone to gloat that his guys had finally won, and they were saying they were glad he wasn’t around to enjoy it. They were so aggravated the Yankees lost that seventh game, they didn’t want to hear a word from him. Good riddance, stay in the Midwest awhile.

And so on the phone to his daughter Linda all those decades later, Grampa Godino the converted Yankee fan was determined not miss out on the shindig she was informing him about. He had a wee inkling it might be related to HOPE Week, and intended to be there no matter what.

He was also getting some insurance from a higher place. The previous Sunday, at church Mass, the priest had gotten up before the congregation and said, “I want you people to think of one thing that you want to pray for … just one thing for this week.”

Grampa’s prayer was that it wouldn’t rain on Thursday. That was his one prayer. For the success of the lemonade sale he sensed was a little more than a lemonade sale. And really, truly, it wasn’t about meeting baseball players for him.

Really, it was about his love for Megan. 

The proof comes when Robinson Cano has the misfortune of showing up right as he’s in the middle of telling a favorite story about her. As far as players go, Cano is no small potatoes. Cano is a major star. But asked if he wants to go over and meet him, Grampa waves a hand in the air.

“I can see him later,” he says. “Let me finish.”

A few years ago, he’s been saying, Megan had taken part in fundraising for the Cross Road Foundation. They offer counseling, explain what options are available make arrangements for medical, social and legal services.

“So this organization raises money every year by bringing milk bottles, plastic milk bottles, to various venues like churches and other areas,” Grampa says. “The milk bottle is set somewhere, and people put donations in, they put coins in. The idea is to fill up the milk bottle with coins. And when you’re finished, you get out another bottle, and you start on it. And Megan wanted to help, and got involved in this for a few years …”

And one year, with the help of her mom, she had put couple of milk bottles just inside the door of her house. Anybody who visited would see those milk bottles, and Megan would point to them as the person came in. And their visitors would deposit some coins.

That year Megan wound up with maybe four, five or six of these plastic milk bottles, all kinds of change in them. “We lifted them up at once, and they were heavy,” Grampa says. “And we brought them to where they were supposed to be donated.”

Realizing how good she was at fundraising, Megan and the Cross Road Foundation came up with the idea of her running a collection outside church on a Sunday.  She’d gone to the Mass, and afterward moved outside in her wheelchair, which has a tray on it that serves as a kind of table.

That day, Megan had put plastic bottles for the Cross Road Foundation on it, and brochures explaining the services they provided to people -- mostly young women -- in desperate need of support and information.

“And everybody put in bills,” Grampa says proudly. “Singles, five dollar bills, ten dollar bills. They saw her, the big smile on her face, and they were putting paper money in the bottles. And those, those are easy to pick up, not like the coins!”

Later, the foundation invited Megan to a breakfast at a Staten Island restaurant, where she received an award for collecting the most money for that particular series of donations. Her family was, of course, invited.

“So we were at her table, and they called her name … and she didn’t need any help,” Grampa says. “She backed down the aisle in her electric wheelchair, and she went right up to where the podium was. My wife and I, the tears are coming down, I was trying to take pictures, but there were tears getting in my eyes. She goes up there, they give her such a nice presentation … and that was one of the things she really loved to do. Because she knew they were helping children.”

Megan continues to work with the foundation and other charities and community projects. After a local park opened up in 2006, she and her family discovered the government had not delivered on promised facilities for the disabled, and with the assistance of a local politician, had full-body support swings, ramps, Braille signs, and other features installed. As Grampa will readily tell you, her thoughts are never about herself, but what she can do for others.

Grampa pauses in his storytelling, looking across the field at the lemonade stand. Grandma has come over to where he’s been talking about Megan for over half an hour. This is her third visit and she looks impatient.

“Come take a picture,” she says, brandishing a camera. “I want us to take a picture with Megan and Robinson Cano. By her stand.”

Grampa hesitates. “I was just going to tell something else about her.”

All the way from Florida, he’s come. To see these Yankees, he says. And in large part, that’s true. Grampa Godino, former Brooklyn Dodgers fan, loves his New York Yankees, deeply appreciates what they have done for his family on this day, and insists only they could have interrupted his vacation.

But watching him gaze across the lawn at his two granddaughters, one in a wheelchair, the other beside her, both smiling, it is easy to see the biggest stars in his eyes.

Grandma is looking steadily at him. “Come,” she says. “A picture.”

At last he nods. “Okay,” he says. “A picture! With Robbie Cano!”

And then Grampa and Grandma start forward through the crowd and together they cross the lawn toward Megan’s stand. 

Follow Jerome Preisler on Twitter: @YankeesInk