OPEN HEARTS [T, 8-20-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of an Old Man—OPEN HEARTS [T, 8-20-24]

 

Our neighbor brought us banana bread yesterday. She is going to have heart surgery, so she needs to stay busy. They are going to cut it open and replace some stuff. She is understandably anxious about it.

She need not be, though. Heart surgery is so routine anymore. It will be at the drive-thru window at the hospital. Or maybe they’ll give her a home kit so she can do it herself, if the surgeon wants to play golf that day. Heart surgery is so ho-hum now.

Not when they dug into the heart of Jack Lamb, the funeral director in my home town. They were going to do the first open-heart surgery ever. In Boston. They had interviewed several people who were desperate for heart help, but they didn’t find anyone with the right personality. For this unknown territory, they needed somebody who was either not afraid or didn’t care or felt that he could beat anything at its own game.

“Old Doc Ropp,” as distinct from “Young” Doc Ropp, heard about it and called them up and said, “Have I got the right guy for you. His heart is terrible, but he’s not afraid, he doesn’t care, and he figures he can beat anybody at anything. I can get him to Boston.”

Despite his profession, Jack was no Digger O’Dell. [1] Jack was a cockeyed optimist, with the confidence of a banty rooster. The folks in Boston interviewed him and judged that he had the right sort of heart in his head. [2]

I got to know Jack, as much as you ever get to know the parents of your friends. Dave Lamb was a year behind me in school, but we worked on the school newspaper together, topping out when I was Editor and Dave was Art Editor and drew the “Super Snooper” comic strip for the paper, which was not easy, since it had to be done with a stylus on a stencil for a mimeograph machine. We were newspaper friends who became hanging out friends, so I was sometimes at their house, which was part of the funeral home, as was the usual in those days. Jack liked to entertain us by sitting down at the funeral organ and playing current hits, like “Mr. Sandman,” by ear. [3]

Our neighbor owes a lot to the surgeons who have pioneered heart surgery, and made so much of it seem so simple now, almost like treating a cold. But she owes a lot to Jack Lamb, too.

Jack wasn’t just an optimist. He was a man of faith. He believed in life, and he believed that God was at work in this life. That’s why he had no fear, and didn’t care, and believed he could beat down any bad deal life threw at him.

His heart was bad, but his heart was just right.

John Robert McFarland

1] We would laugh so hard when Digger would say, mournfully, “Well, I’d better be shoveling off,” on “The Life of Riley” radio show back in the 1940s.

2] You won’t find this on the internet. But Jack’s surgery was in 1950, before the instances that are recounted on the sites Google brings up. You can’t trust historians fully. They claim that Paul Molitor’s 37 consecutive game hit streak was the longest since Joe DiMaggio’s 56. Not so; Pete Rose had 44.

3] When Dave married Maggie Jepson at the end of their college days, he asked me to officiate at their wedding. Fifty years later, they made the trip all the way from Barrington, IL to Iron Mountain, MI just so we could celebrate together.

Even though heart surgery is routine now, it's okay to pray for our neighbor. Her name is Stacy.