The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome Read Online Free PDF Page A

videotape. When I got to where the pile of mail was on the kitchen table, I sat down and Curt dropped to one knee.
    And so, with the season winding down, we got engaged. Curt finished up in middle relief and closing (coming in after the starting pitcher left the game), and my first off-season came as a huge relief. Unfortunately, time moves pretty quickly, and not long after Christmas we packed our dogs and clothes and headed to Orlando for spring training. The six weeks of spring training go fast, too, and before I knew it I was driving the dogs back to Houston with two other wives on the team. Wives usually pack the cars and drive them back from spring training, and this first year I was in a caravan with Patty Biggio and Nancy Caminiti on what would be a two-day drive.
    I was listening to the last spring training game of the year on the radio when, about halfway to Houston, I heard, “The big news today: Curt Schilling has just been traded to the Philadelphia Phillies.” I was almost an accident statistic before I had a chance to be a bride; I could barely keep my car on the road.
    When I got hold of Curt, we only had a few minutes to talk. He was taking off to meet the Philadelphia team in Miami on the final day of spring training. I would continue the ten-hour journey to Houston, pack the house up, get the first flight out of there, and once again find us a place to live in a new city. I wouldn’t even get a chance to say good-bye to anyone.
    As hard as it was to fathom relocating yet again, I was very happy about this move, in part because it would put me back on the East Coast, not too far from my parents. I’ve always hated being far from my family, and this was almost like being traded back home.
     

    I T’S AMAZING HOW ONE decision by one person can change everything in your world. While Curt was throwing in the Phillies bullpen the very next day, in a downpour of rain, his new pitching coach, Johnny Podres, took notice. “You throw way too hard to be a closer,” the coach said. “You’ve got a Hall of Fame arm, kid. We’re going to make you a starter someday!”
    Those two sentences changed our lives forever. Curt really began to shine. He was on his way to becoming one of the greatest starters in baseball, all because one guy decided to give him that chance.
    The 1992 season was a successful one, and the following November, we got married. The ceremony was in the church I’d started going to when I was in the second grade, just down the block from my parents’ home in Dundalk, Maryland. In the beginning, I’d gone because a friend of mine went. My family didn’t do church. Ever. I suppose I was searching for something, some kind of deeper meaning to life.
    Without fail, I went every Sunday. When I was very young, my mom would walk me across the street and right to the door, and she would be waiting for me when I got out. When I got a little older, I went on my own. I went all the way through to confirmation. There was this really devout wonderful older congregant who watched over all the kids. I called him Uncle Tommy from the day I met him, until the day he died in the late 1990s. He was a lifelong friend and someone I can’t imagine having lived without.
    “Will you be my acolyte?” he’d ask again and again.
    “Okay,” I’d say, and there was something about it that made me feel accountable in a good way.
    Church and spirituality have been big parts of my life ever since. One of the beliefs instilled in me in church was that it is important to do for others. When you do something for someone in need, the feeling you get is infinitely better than anything else life has to offer.
    In 1993 I was happy to have the opportunity to begin helping others. That’s when Curt and I were introduced to Dick Bergeron, a patient withamyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS is a cruel disease in which patients progressively lose muscle function—and their