Long-lost friend at last a doctor

Several years ago, in the early days of my adult life, I was home visiting from Indianapolis, where I had a sports marketing job.

I was making up the bed in my parents’ room, when Mama appeared in the door.

She took a deep breath. “I have something to tell you.” From the gentleness of her tone and the woe in her eyes, I knew it wasn’t good. “Something sad,” she added unnecessarily.

“No.” I said firmly, shaking my head.

She pursed her lips tightly before continuing. “Neal O’Kelley died a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to wait until you came home so I could tell you in person.”

Today, after all these years, I can still feel the explosion in my heart that shook my entire body. Tears rushed, without a moment’s wait, to my eyes and numbly I dropped down on the edge of the bed. “No, no, no,” I moaned, not knowing then that he was the first in a long line of young friends who would leave this world much too soon. By my early thirties, I would count six of them. All guys I had loved in one way or the other.

“It was a gun accident,” she explained as I dropped my head in my hands and sobbed mightily.

Neal O’Kelley was my second sweetheart, the first having appeared in my life when I was 4. Neal took his part of my heart at the ripe old age of 7 when he asked me to go on the hayride at the school’s annual Halloween Carnival.

He would slip notes across the aisle that asked, “Do you like me? Circle yes or no.”

He was as purely Scotch-Irish in his looks as his name would suggest, including a mass of freckles and a shock of red hair with a cowlick that, for all the years I knew him, refused to be tamed.

Neal was always the last kid chosen for dodge ball or Red Rover but always the last left standing in spelling bees and, without fail, the winner of every science and math contest.

Throughout grammar school, Neal was my favorite. He ran like a scrawny goof, laughing merrily at himself as much as we laughed at him. He brought me endless joy because he was so downright funny. Somewhere along our journey through junior high and high school, Neal lost his sense of humor. He rarely smiled, focusing seriously and somberly on his studies.

Neal, you see, was determined to be a doctor. We had no doubt he would. He had the brilliant mind, compassionate heart and ambition that it would take. In my youthful ignorance, it never crossed my mind that he wouldn’t live long enough to do that.

For all these years, I have carried the memory of Neal in my heart, missing him in a way too sad to explain. In my first novel, I placed a minor but important character in the plot who’s a doctor. When I initially wrote the character, I named him after my friend Sam Richwine, also a doctor. But it wasn’t right. In loving tribute to my childhood friend, I knew I had to name him Dr. Neal O’Kelley.

So, Neal, at long last, is a doctor. I just wish I could call him up and make an appointment.