We’re at the curb in her new, white BMW, preparing to brave late October’s chill. She’s telling me, in the way she and I have come to converse, how you were born to greatness.

"I remember it, as if it were yesterday," she says, her eyes still a glistening, defensive red. "It was early morning and spring, and I was lying there trying not to relive the pain, a breeze straying through an open window of my hospital room. They brought Carlos to me, smiling in his sleep. ‘He doesn’t cry,’ the nurses told me, ‘he gurgles.’ He had charmed one nurse to such a degree I was afraid she wouldn’t let me have him. Eventually she did, and he nestled into my shoulder. A wonderful calm – I’ve always called it the calm of destiny - settled over us."

She reaches into her bag and lifts out a stitched-leather sphere. The once-supple covering has grown hard, a disease of cracks spread across its surface. "You see, it was always my dream. I wanted him to see the ball, to feel it, as soon as we got him home. I know he sensed something special about it when I placed it in the crib. He squirmed and turned to one side, and the ball rolled, bumped an arm, a hip. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ I whispered to him. ‘One day it’ll make you great.’ Then he looked up and smiled. He knew what the ball was going to mean to him."

"How?" I ask. "How could he have known? How could you have known?"

She fishes a tissue from her purse and blots a single tear. The rain has stopped and a high, humming wind is baring the sun, the poplars lining the street shaking free of their last leaves. "A child can sense his destiny, surely you would admit that."

"Yes, but it’s, well, unheard of in one so young."

A moment of happiness lifts her face, spreads. "But it’s true. I could hear fame gurgling, see fortune in that beautiful smile. It was a mother and child thing, I suppose."

"I suppose."

"Then John - that’s his father - John lifted the ball and held it a foot above Carlos’ round face. Those big blue eyes searched until they found it. John leaned forward, barely able to hold the position because of the pain in that block-layer’s back of his, and he lowered the ball, just inches above. Carlos raised one chubby little hand and ran a finger down the stitching." She sighs. "He knew he was meant to play The Game."

The Game. She tells me that by six you were on the diamond, slapping the ball with authority, bouncing it from the child’s tee through a maze of soprano crowcalls along the red dust infield to the grass beyond.

Reaching for an inner balance, a counterweight for her void, too late in the making, she continues. "From the start he was an athlete, a star, even. His talent, it just blossomed." She unfurls her hands, imitating an opening flower. "I wonder." Her gaze is traveling, chasing her thoughts, perhaps to a place even I have yet to visit, a place reachable only by the slow unwinding of mortal sorrow. "I wonder if he ever thought about it, you know? That the fans needed him, to fill the holes in their own dreams, to believe anything’s possible." She watches a yellow leaf stumble across the windshield and drop to the street’s still-wet surface.

"Sure, the athletes I’ve watched, they know the moments of greatness, win or lose, aren’t just theirs." I realize she isn’t listening. Again, she’s visiting some pleasure from your past.

"By the beginning of his senior year," she goes on, "every major college scout had a file on him, had visited him, courted him, made promises. He wasn’t meant for college, though." She shakes her head, defiant. "It would have been a waste of precious years."

Then she smiles. "So there we were, sitting in front of the television, barely breathing, watching his first major league at-bat. The count went to three and one before we heard him connect, then the ball cleared that green left field wall. The phone started ringing, just rang and rang. John took a couple of calls and then unplugged it. Later we watched him run ten yards past the right field foul line and dive into the seats. He raised his glove, showed us the ball, and that ended the ninth inning."

She closes her eyes. "But you saw it, I think."

"I did. From over center field."

"He made the all-star team that year, and the next two years, too."

Then she gives her account of your fourth year, the year destiny’s other shoe fell. Two hours before the season opener, you stumbled, fell down a flight of stairs at Yankee Stadium. "It came on so quickly. He began dropping things, and not just in right field. He started slurring his words. The next year he was so embarrassed he quit giving interviews."

"You missed a few essentials, though," I interrupt. "When you took over his press conferences, told the reporters how brave he was, how determined to beat the disease, I know you believed it. But he wasn’t sure at all. He cried constantly, threw fits. Away from you, so as not to disappoint. He kept the jags as private as possible, but I saw them."

"I don’t know about that," she almost shouts, climbing from the car and bending into the wind. Inside the chapel she strides without hesitation to the front, drops the ball into the casket. "It was a bad, a terrible year. I had my hands full with John’s cancer."

The chapel doors open and others enter, heads down. She slumps into a pew and her thoughts wander to your teammates, those burly, beer-swilling boy-men, taking their seats across the aisle. She nods as, one by one, they turn. She acknowledges their slumping shoulders and vacant eyes, their willingness to be here, to bear your casket, the way they carried your slumping athleticism that last season.

The service drones to a close, and a pair of them come forward, reminisce, try to joke, then break down. But even they know little of your helplessness after you left the field, only its name, amytropic lateral sclerosis. They never witnessed the effort it took to perform the simplest tasks - they can hardly imagine the ordeal of fastening shirt buttons and tying shoelaces. It would have tested their strength to see you struggle to chew your food and swallow, only to fall back exhausted, gasping for breath.

Shoes begin to whisper on the carpet, the pastor inviting the pallbearers forward first for a last glance, and it’s almost time for my part in this. I know, I should take the lead and leave it at that, but I still can’t get past your anger as your playing days ended. The fans expected so much, refusing to allow you your humanity, even after you began to stagger and fumble your words.

And yes, your Mom, head now to her bodice, she shared those cannibalizing expectations, the Mom whose love you thought you’d lost. The Mom whose disappointment ran so deep she refused to watch your stumbling, on-field efforts, intent instead on shoring up your finances, your legacy, abandoning you in the end to a hospice.

It’s not my aim to aggravate either relationship now, merely to say that when you surrendered to the disease, she did too, and so did the fans. Would they have felt differently had they seen the nurses keeping the television in your room tuned to games on ESPN because of the faint smile it elicited? That your doctor, the one with the deep, unbending gaze, succumbed to your captive passion? That he sat with you for a half-hour each day, his hand on yours, the two of you watching recaps from the previous day’s games? That it was he who chose to be with you at the end, in the quiet hours just before dawn? I doubt it. It’s their failing to have confused the glory with you, that when it ended, you died for them.

And so she rises, others following. Reaching the casket she bends, turns, lifts the ball and holds it high. A jot of laughter breaks the solemnity, and your teammates applaud. She places the ball inside your right elbow, turns to scan the chapel’s farthest reaches.

"He’s here," she says, only to me.

"It’s a common phenomenon," I tell her. "Maybe he doesn’t yet understand the gulf he’s crossed. Or he’s dredging for, you know, any crumb of love he might’ve missed."

A man with delicate, white hands closes the casket and, at last, she surrenders to grief, one of your teammates guiding her away. "Please bring him back," she moans into her handkerchief.

But she was right the first time – there you are in the back row, having again settled into that state from which it’s possible to see me, for me to see you. I’m there in the span of a thought, and something within me gladdens as we exchange our form of handshake.

"I thought it was you, from the hospice, right? Say, what do you hear from Gehrig? I was hoping he’d come."

"He wanted to be here today," I admit, dimming my effulgence, avoiding the deeper, necessary connection for one final tick of time, "but you know how it is with celebrity ex-athletes. There’s always something, signings and such. He asked me to say hello." It’s awkward, this unfinished role with you.

"You’ve been a pal, thanks for taking the time. That play-by-play helped me work out a few things."

"I put it in a form you could digest, that’s all," I reply, deflecting the gratitude, "and your Mom does love you, despite what you think. It was never about money."

"Well, listen, man, I’m not mad anymore. Let’s go."

That brightens me, brightens us both, and we slip outside, into the sun and wind. A gust takes us, a fog hovering over the river we’re seeking. I point into the mist, and you nod, whistle, head bent, hands in pockets, and disappear.

"Vaya con dios." That’s all I can come up with and, not knowing the language’s nuances, I hope the phrase is consoling, hope it means I’ll miss you, we all will, that The Game is transcendent and awaits you. Of course, I’ll never know for sure. My fate remains that of a pilot, a steersman navigating others between two shores, and it will take me elsewhere, forever elsewhere.

But I do hear the rumors. They say your destiny there will never yield an off-season - your gifts are far too great. The fans, they’re waiting for you, ordering beer, hot dogs, listening to The Game’s raucous music as it swirls through an airy stadium. There you’ll always find yourself suited up, knocking the dirt from your spikes, taking the sign and assuming your stance, staring down the strike zone.

Myth has never been my cup of tea, but the stories are repeated so often I have to consider the rest. You’ll stride into the first pitch, they say, a heater, low and outside. Swinging with a rush of strength and agility, you’ll wreck the ball with that characteristic bark of wood on leather. The bat will drop, the arena hushed. You’ll run at first, until you’re sure, then you’ll hear a gasp, and a slowly rising cheer. The ball will soar above the lights and you’ll grin and begin the trot, watching exhilaration tangible as light over the field. And here, they say, watch carefully, because something near-eternal will rise from the tiers of fans to meet the same from you, then gather in a glow about that small, white, stitched sphere. Together you’ll watch it clatter into a place of repose in the centerfield bleachers, their dreams yours, fulfilled, if only for that infinitesimally brief moment.