Miracle

In cupboards and closets across the country, Kombucha mushrooms are floating in bowls of sugared tea and saturating a growing number of homes with the smell of vinegar and the hope for restored vigor.Kombucha, a white, gelatinous blob about 12 inches in diameter that propagates quickly, has spread like a New Age chain letter in recent months. Its cultivators estimate that more than 3 million Americans are now growing the fungi.When fermented, the Kombucha (kom-BOO-cha) creates a sparkling beverage that tastes like hard apple cider.

I'D LIKE ONE OF THOSE Christmas miracles to happen to me.You know the kind. Where the hard heart is softened or the disbelieving finally believe. One of those made-for-TV, innocence-overcomes-cynicism holiday miracles.But in this edition of the Christmas miracle movie, I am transformed into the ideal Christmas Mom in the first reel and we spend the next two hours watching me get it right. Christmas, I mean.I have never met the ideal Christmas Mom. She is not my mother, or any mother I know.

Debbie Meeks edged closer to the faith healer, hands folded over herabdomen as if to shield the fibroid tumors clustering about her ovaries.This was the night. The 35-year-old woman was certain. She had come to Broadneck High School with faith that God would heal her and make her able to have a child.Down front, the healing evangelist, the Rev. Mahesh Chavda, was talking about Jesus. Sick people, holding onto walkers or crutches, weak and frail and hopeful, pressed down the aisles of the auditorium.

NEW YORK -- Picture this:It is 1994, the World Cup is under way, and the U.S. soccer team has made it to the second round, upsetting the status quo. Now it has designs on the championship. Crowds fill stadiums wherever the American team is playing, and the chants are deafening:"Bor-a! Bor-a! Bor-a!"It has a familiar ring, like "De-Fense! De-Fense!" But this is not American football, this is soccer and it has captured the imagination of America. The man they are cheering is Bora Milutinovic, who has turned the U.S. team into a heavyweight contender for the Cup.Is that picture only a dream?

FEW ACTIVITIES are more heart-warming to watch than a Little League baseball game. Here in Northwest Carroll, parents and children take their baseball seriously enough to practice the game, commit to it, and raise the money to keep it going -- all the while maintaining a spirit of cooperation and enjoyment that keeps the fun in the game.My son can't wait until Wednesday and Saturday evenings to suit up and play ball. Anyone whose child has played a team sport, or has played on a team himself, knows that physical skills and mental strategy are mastered on the playing field.

Baltimore believes it has found the perfect book for summer reading. City leaders have chosen the hopeful tale of a New York City family's struggle to stay afloat during difficult times as the third annual "Baltimore's Book," and are urging Baltimoreans to discuss the novel. Miracle's Boys, by Jacqueline Woodson, was published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 2000 and received the next year's Corretta Scott King Award, presented by the American Library Association and established to honor African-American authors and illustrators of outstanding children's and young adults' literature.

Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, the ebullient Memphis, Tenn., couple who made Michael Oher their third child, enrolled him at Ole Miss, then cheered him on when he became a Baltimore Raven, have collaborated on their own version of the story that became the book and the hit movie "The Blind Side." With Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins, they've written "In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving." Their book aims to bring the Michael Oher miracle off the big screen and back down to real life — and make sure that its message won't get lost.

Although the season opener is more than four months away, Ravens defensive end Michael McCrary stood on the 50-yard line of PSINet Stadium yesterday, delivering his first contribution of the year. The two-time Pro Bowl performer established a nonprofit foundation called Mac's Miracle Fund, with an initial offering of $100,000 that will go directly to Special Olympics Maryland. It's the largest charitable donation by a Ravens player in franchise history. The amount also represents the biggest single gift by a professional athlete to an individual Special Olympics program throughout the world.

The Rev. Ronald P. Pytel, the pastor of Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church in Southeast Baltimore whose recovery from a life-threatening heart condition was declared a miracle by Vatican authorities four years ago, died of kidney cancer Monday at a home he restored in Middle Way, W.Va. He was 56. Father Pytel received a diagnosis of a degenerative aortic valve and congestive heart failure in the mid-1990s. Operated on at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he recovered, all the while praying to Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun who had been recently beatified.

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. - The tiny padded bundles chug across the ice like miniature fire plugs on skates. Teetering on the edge of gravity, one little player lifts his stick and shoots. The puck makes a lazy, wobbling trip through the crease and past the sprawling goalie before it arrives, exhausted, at the back of the net. Another miracle on ice is born. Hollywood is taking a second crack at re-creating the original miracle: the 1980 Olympic hockey game between a scrappy U.S. squad and the four-time defending gold medal Soviet team, named the greatest sports moment of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated.