Published: June 28, 2008 11:14 pm      

He’s gotten just too big for his britches

It’s overdue, but here’s an update about my friend who had surgery last fall to remove the cancerous remnants of his stomach. He’d already been living with half a belly because of a misadventure that earned him a Purple Heart in Vietnam.

I’d asked folks to join me in praying for him, and it worked. If you didn’t know him, you might think he’s thin, but he looks healthier and more robust than any of his friends remember seeing him. He’s outgrown the pants size he wore for years.

He has a voracious appetite for someone who literally has no stomach for food and brags gleefully about being hungry — knowing damn well that most of his friends have to watch what they eat.

“For the first time in years,” he says, “I don’t hurt.”

He has more energy than generally is good for someone our age and often applies it to an ingenious sense of mischief.

Shortly after I met him and his wife, we got together for breakfast with another couple. I knew the man’s name (we’ll call him Joe) but not his wife’s, so I asked my friend what it was.

He looked at me with a dead-flat expression I hadn’t seen before and said, “Why, it’s Cleo,” (also a made-up name).

After 40-some years in the newspaper business, I’ve learned how to smell a rat even when I can’t see one. I could almost hear this one’s whiskers and tail twitching.

The name he’d given me with an uncustomary straight face was an uncommon name, and I knew of only one other woman who had it. I’d seen her in the same places I’d seen the four folks I was eating breakfast with ... but not in any way associating with them.

So I waited until Joe’s wife left the table and asked him what her name was.

“Alice,” he said (again, fictitious).

I told him our friend said it was Cleo.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t call her that,” he said in between guffaws. “She’d have ripped your throat out. Alice hates Cleo.”

When Alice returned, I mentioned that our friend had told me her name was Cleo. Her eyes opened wide, and she sprung up bellowing from her chair as if to come after my friend — who was leaning back in his chair at the opposite end of the table, looking at me with an enormously satisfied grin.

Why does my friend means so much to me? There are many reasons, and there are others who feel the same way I do. For one, there was a turning point in my life when he became a major provider of reassurance without my even being aware of it, and it worked. When he became ill, I tried to return the favor.

His wife is one of the sweetest people I know. He teases and torments her, and she just looks around at the witnesses with a quiet smile that says how things really are. They adore each other in a way that’s far too rare.

I never told my friend this, but the day of his operation, I ran into one of our buddies at lunchtime. We began talking about him and discovered a mutual feeling that we might have seen him for the last time. We feared that he might not even survive the surgery — let alone have the strength to recover from it.

A few days earlier, our friend had been so weak he could hardly stand up. There was a get-together, and he hadn’t felt like coming out, but did so anyway because there were people he needed to talk to.

He wanted me to have something that, considering its nature, must have been terribly important to him. My buddy received custody of something equally significant.

It also turned out that our friend had dropped the “S” bomb on both of us when we called him the night before: scared.

So we did what any self-respecting men ought to do under such circumstances ... we found a bar and got self-respectably hammered. We talked for a long time about our friend and other subjects we might otherwise avoid, lest we reveal more sensitivity than we like to let on.

And to hell with anyone’s idea of political correctness when it comes to such matters. Neither of us drove home in that condition. Call it a guy thing or whatever you like, I’ve done it before and probably will do it again. One time was at my best friend’s kitchen table, with him and his uncles and a few bottles of wine, after his dad’s funeral.

If you need to have this explained, you probably wouldn’t understand it anyway.

But my friend did survive his operation, and today he is happy, healthy and eating like a horse — which he was doing when I saw him at a picnic last weekend.

“She just called me on the cell phone and said she’s in Morgantown!” he said.

Who’s in Morgantown?

“My wife!”

Why is she there and not here?

“She went to pick up our grandson and bring him back to the picnic!”

They took turns pushing the little fellow around in his baby buggy so everyone could see him and fuss over him. He’s precious, and I’d met his parents once before. His mother is a pretty girl who takes after her mom, and his dad is built like a gymnast and ruggedly handsome.

The kid is six months old and doesn’t like hospitals any more than his grandfather does. Without any help, he removed the plastic straps they’d put on his ankle and wrist and beat them against the bed frame until not much was left.

The golf ball-sized tumor that tried to hide behind his heart was benign, and the doctors were able to remove all of it. He won’t need any of the chemicals or radiation that his grandfather said made him feel far worse than the cancer did.

Who says there are no more miracles? I’ve seen least two of them, just in the last few months.