Richard Grayson went to the funeral of a friend’s dad instead of the Met’s season finale. The funeral was a whole let less depressing.

For those of us who’ve been Mets fans since the days of Marvin E. Thornberry in hapless 1962, last Sunday’s season finale was depressing.

My old friend Mark – whom I used to tease about being the only Puerto Rican kid in the Bronx to prefer the Mets to the Yankees – called to say he had an extra ticket for the game.  But I had to go to somewhere less depressing than I knew Shea Stadium would be: the I.J. Morris funeral chapel back in my old neighborhood.

As I rode the Flatbush Avenue bus there, I couldn’t help remembering that it was on the B-41 bus that I’d met Sol’s son, going to Brooklyn College on our first day as freshmen in late September 1969.

I also knew Sol’s daughter-in-law at BC since she was one of the two best friends of my senior year girlfriend – at whose daughter’s bat mitzvah a few months ago I had last seen Mitch and Helen.  I’d also celebrated last Yom Kippur with them over dinner at Cortelyou Road’s The Farm at Adderly.

Mitch, a graduate of Brooklyn Law School, works as an attorney; Helen’s a journalist with the Courier Life newspaper chain, writing countless stories over the years about the people and happenings

They have a beautiful house in Fiske Park; their son goes to Brooklyn Tech and their daughter, a recent Murrow grad, got a full scholarship as a CUNY Honors College student at Hunter.

Sol was 84 and owned a hardware store.  He was a Brooklyn community activist, president of the Futurama Civic Association as recently as a few years ago, when he was quoted in a New York Times real estate article, “If You’re Thinking of Living in Flatlands.”

(The 1950s developers who built my old neighborhood’s semi-detached brick two-family homes with a finished basement called them ”futuramas,” and the name lives on.)

I’d met Sol only once or twice when I was at his house, brought there by another friend who was visiting Mitch’s sister Amy.  His generation of lifelong Brooklynites – now we call them the Greatest Generation – is slowly but surely leaving the scene.

I’ve attended two recent lectures – by the historian Mike Wallace on the future of Brooklyn and by Joseph Berger, author of The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through New York’s New Neighborhoods – that confirmed what my eyes have told me since I returned to the borough last year. Neighborhoods once distinctly “Irish” and “Italian” and non-Orthodox “Jewish” are becoming something else.

Other ethnic neighborhoods I knew as a kid, like Bay Ridge’s Norwegian enclave, seem to have completely disappeared.  “Lapskaus Boulevard,” that section of Eighth Avenue named for the salty Scandinavian stew – where I saw King Olav V 32 years ago this week – is now mostly Chinese.

I don’t see any signs left of the Mohawk Indian community of what we now call Boerum Hill, which I found about from Rainbow, an Indian kid in my neighborhood.

The rabbi began the service at Sol’s funeral by reciting that passage from Ecclesiastes that begins “To every thing there is a season…”  So we know that change is natural.  But there’s also sadness when things you knew and loved pass on.

Sol’s brother-in-law, who had known him since he was a kid in Coney Island, began his eulogy by saying that Sol would have wanted the Mets and Phillies scores announced at the cemetery.

The Mets lost, of course.  I guess some things do not change.