by Chris Humpherys

Created on: January 31, 2010

Warning.  This is not a post about sports.  It is, but it’s not.

What you are about to read is not a breakdown of the upcoming Super Bowl XLIV, a spring training preview, a mid-season NBA review or a Tiger Woods where for art thou piece.

This is a post about love, life, family and passing.  So please, if you’re not in the mood to shed a tear, turn away now.  I won’t mind.  But if you do feel like celebrating the life of someone very special, by all means read on.

I’ll wait while you get some tissue.

My best friend’s mother passed away last week.  This is a woman who was my mother’s best friend for forty years.  This is a woman who helped raise me.  This is a loving, caring soul who had a profound impact on my life.

When I was only a few years old, we lived in Freehold, New Jersey.  Yes the home town of one Bruce Springsteen.

One morning, out of the blue, a school bus crashed into the side of our house.  Miraculously nobody was injured, but from that accident came several lifelong friendships.

A woman came over to my house that day and asked if there was anything she could do to help in our time of need.  Natalie and my mother have been best friends ever since.  Forty years of ups an downs, laughter and tears, good times and bad.

Years after the bus crash, mom and I were living in Manhattan, but the cost of living in the city was too much for a struggling, single journalist to afford.  It was Natalie who once again came to our rescue, taking us in despite the fact that she herself was broke.

Natalie’s son Jason and I grew up together and remain best friends to this day.  We were products of the 1970s, raised by single, strong, professional women.  They molded us into the men, dare I say gentlemen, that we are today.  For that, we are eternally grateful.  We wouldn’t have had it any other way.

When mom worked into the night, it was Natalie who cared for us.  She took us to Cooperstown, a trip I remember as if it were yesterday.  When Jason, a Yankees fan, and I, a Red Sox fan, would beat the living tar our of each other, it was Natalie who would separate us.  We were so bad, she once threatened to leave us on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Natalie was an extremely knowledgeable sports fan.  Back when the game meant something, she could rattle off the stats on the back of a baseball card as easily

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