A long absence from home makes the heart grow fonder

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Two months ago, I left this stop bragging I’d probably be around in a month.

Little did I know. A well-advertised bellyache turned out to be a major overhaul. I likened the experience to the time I brought my 1939 Packard touring automobile into a garage and the mechanic reported back that the engine was about one-half gallon short of dying in my dooryard.

I am not going into the details of my breakdown, though I now know for certain if your hospital name tag reads Maine you can get there even if you are ailing in California, some 2,950 air miles from home base.

Allow me a few minutes to explain.

I am stripped and strapped to one of those board-hard hospital gurneys, hurting and feeling bad for myself. Dr. Michael Last has been engaged to drag a scalpel down my lower abdomen and begin a search to remove what has been determined to be colon cancer.

I’m wheeled into this room where I am told that once Dr. Last leaves the starting blocks, he is a fast worker and rarely loses a patient’s blood supply. Now I am now greeted by a smiling, red-haired angel, who quietly blurts out, “Hi Bud Leavitt, I’m your nurse.”

Huh? What’d you say?

“I’m your nurse and Hampden neighbor.”

I am now believing my brain has shaken loose. Explain that again, will you?

“My home is in Hampden. My parents are Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Bradley. They live on the main road, east Hampden. I’m Kathy Bradley. We live in the house that sets back off the road, the one where the lilacs line both sides of our lawn. Probably seven, eight houses from where you live in Hampden.”

I find out Kathy graduated from Hampden Academy and the University of Maine and, before departing for Hawaii and another nursing assignment, I am her last patient at the Eisenhower Memorial Hospital.

Some three days after surgery, before departing for Hawaii, Kathy stopped by and left me a collection of photographs. They were pictures of rock-shored Schoodic Point, “I thought these pictures of home would lift your spirits.” They did, too.

Kathy Bradley and I have a dinner date when she comes home for a visit in October.

One night after Kathy left Rancho Mirage, Calif., a rugged, thick-necked man walked into my room overlooking the Betty Ford grounds, and asked, “How are things in Bangor? I’m your night nurse. My name’s Tom.”

What did you ask?

“How are things in Bangor? Been there quite often before I came out here. I come from Scarborough. You probably have never been to Scarborough. It’s near Portland.”

I assured Tom I was quite familiar with Scarborough.

Then there was Dora, a most professional old-timer in the nursing business.

“You catch any fish last summer at the Matepedia?”

What was that again, Dora?

“I asked you if you caught any salmon last year on the Matepedia River?”

I said I never got to fish the Matepedia a year ago. And how come you asked?

“Oh, my husband and I have watched you telling those fish stories with a straight face for years on television. How are the Red Sox doing this year?”

Dora lives in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, and at this hour she and her husband are driving east with a planned stop at Fenway Park to see some baseball.

“Then, I guess, we’ll head to New Brunswick for the summer. Be back here in the fall, when the weather cools. Roll your butt to one side so I can remake your bed.”

I found Dora to be entertaining and efficient.

Save for those hourly visits from family, there were times when the mind wandered. Will I ever smell the fragrance of springtime in Maine? Taste the water from free-running springs? Hear the laughter of my five grandchildren? See the dust boil up from back-country roads? Fish with friends who know how to breathe life into a trout and Atlantic salmon fly? Share secrets with a thousand and one guys who live life my way? Again view the mighty, spectacular Penobscot River from the viewing decks of the Veazie and Eddington salmon clubs? Admire the time-tested vigor of people who wade through several feet of snow to empty their mail boxes? See acquaintances who don’t understand me and abhor guns?

And how can I ever say thanks for the many hundreds who wrote, sent flowers, candy, mixed nuts and reading material?

You do a lot of thinking lying there alone, penned in by the sides of a hospital bed.

Home is where the heart is. As if you didn’t already know.