Th3 Simple Questions

WHO AM I?

I’m Brian’s friend. Brian is dying. I know because he and I are in a cancer survivors’ support group. He is dying of colorectal cancer. He was diagnosed about a year ago. We are both the same age, born in 1949. He was born in San Francisco and is Chinese American. I was adopted at birth. Since I don’t know my birth mother or father, I told Brian I might be Chinese, too; and that maybe we’re related. He laughed because I have no Chinese features and was born in Texas. What we do have in common is a love for baseball cards. I have a nearly completed ’59 Topps set. And he has hundreds and hundreds of cards from the same vintage, too. But he loved my ’59 Willie Mays card. We got together a couple of times to look at our cards and tell stories about being 10 years old and about the players we admired. He used to wait tables in his grandpa’s restaurant in San Francisco so he could earn enough money to go watch the great Willie Mays play. Mays was his favorite player. Still is.

WHY AM I HERE?

Brian’s wife called me and told me that Brian was dying. He was pretty close. She said that if I wanted to come and say good-bye I should probably come now. Going to a friend’s death bed is an emotional thing. What will I say? What will we do? What does one do sitting at the death bed of a friend? I thought maybe he might want to say good-bye to Willie Mays, too; so I thought I’d take my ’59 Topps Mays card