A NO HITTER

Sometimes in life, things happen to you that defy explanation. Not that it is all that unorthodox but still there are times in your life that are "gee whiz" events. I just had one. Sharon, a really good friend, fought breast cancer for two or three years. To say that she was pretty remarkable before the breast cancer diagnosis would be an understatement. After the diagnosis, she ramped it up several notches. 

Cancer is such an insidious disease and it never affects any two just alike. Sharon did everything right. She fought it: a double mastectomy, clinical trials, you name it. None of it worked. All of us who knew her had no doubt she would beat it. She didn't. 

Sharon's life had never been easy. Fighting for things, the child who had to be the parent to a mother with mental illness. Always she was charging. My goodness. A marriage that died because of a narcissistic physician husband who believed what people told him about physicians' place in the Trinity. Finally, divorced, relieved of this burden, she went to school; working, making contributions in her community, her church. In a word, she was fantastic. Her loss to the universe--the collective holes in our hearts; we thought the universe might possibly sink under the weight of our grief. 

Now gone a couple of years, her husband, Nick, calls me. "Want to go to a ballgame." Did I mention that Sharon's sport passion in life was baseball. She didnot just love it, she breathed it, her overwhelming interest; the SF Giants. Equally she loved the Oakland Athletics. Let's face it, she loved baseball. She knew the players, stats--she believed in the strategy. Want to get in a discussion? Start talking about the game being slow. "You have to understand the strategy," she would emphatically say. She could have easily been an announcer or better still, a manager. 

(To Nick, on a game) "Sure." 

"Well, there are a couple of day games." To be honest I was not all that excited (I love to watch baseball but mainly from the comfort of my living room where my ADD could multitask). She mildly chastised me a couple of times for getting restless at games. She only put up with me because I was always up for going mostly to anything, but, for her, my company at baseball was just fine. 

Nick mentioned, "I feel compelled, haven't been to a game lately and Sharon would want to go." I didn't take much convincing as a flood of memories swamped me. So, here we are going to the game. We don't even have tickets. We did make it: went to the ballgame. Saw a "no hitter," We were stunned. I am convinced that Sharon made it happen. She loved baseball and the two people she loved most in the whole world were at the game and she needed to make it special and what better way than a "no hitter." A miracle. ⚾⚾⚾⚾⚾⚾⚾⚾⚾⚾