My Friend, the Life Saver

A good friend of mine saved a man’s life last night. I wish I could write that sentence every day, but as far as I know, it’s the first time it’s been true.

The friend’s name is Kirk Evans. I don’t know the name of the man whose life he saved, but it would not be surprising if the man were a father and as we know, this coming Sunday is father’s day, so it would not surprise me if Kirk got a card or some expression of gratitude from the man’s child or children, regarding his life-saving effort.

Apparently Kirk and his wife, Nancy, were at a restaurant and the man began to choke. Kirk rushed over and performed the Heimlich maneuver, dislodging whatever it was the man had in his windpipe. Nancy later posted on Facebook how proud she was of Kirk for doing what he did. Within a few minutes the post had well over a hundred likes. This morning it had 140.

It does not surprise me Kirk saved someone’s life. Among the people I know, he would be the one I would vote: Most Likely To Save Someone’s Life. He thinks quickly and clearly.

Kirk’s the type who paints interior walls perfectly without any taping. Which to someone like me, who can barely paint in the middle of the wall, let alone trim; seems like a miracle.

In the Spring of 2013, Kirk and Nancy came down to help us get our house ready to put on the market. It never sold and we took it off, but through no fault of theirs. After they arrived on Friday evening, we went out to eat, relaxed and talked. But come Saturday morning, Kirk put in his earbuds, started the playlist on his phone, began singing and within a few hours, had our hallway with its high ceiling painted, using an extension; dropping no paint and making no mistakes. He immediately then turned his attention to trimming the trees in the front and side of our house with a device that looked like giant scissors on the end of a stick operated with a rope. He cut them and I drug them to the curb, a great example of division of labor according to skill set.

He and Nancy worked tirelessly all that Saturday and Sunday and before they left on Monday morning, I had put four $100 bills in Nancy's purse, figuring I would give him that much, nothing near what their work was worth, but still enough that he would decide it was wise to keep it. After they left, I went upstairs and there on the dresser in the bedroom where they had slept, were the four $100 bills.

Every year in late April, since we first went in 2003, a group of us have gone to Kirk and Nancy’s house to be there for the Derby Festival Marathon. Kirk drives us through the downtown Louisville traffic on Friday evening so we can get our packets. He then gets up around 5:30 on Saturday morning and drives us within a block or so of the starting line on little back alleys no one other than an authority on Louisville streets would know.

Every year for around a decade, he has led a group of other friends in efforts to do repair work on our house. I am not a handy man and he is not someone who likes sitting around without doing some sort of handy-man project, so he and I are a perfect pair. He brings his tools and either paints a room, repairs wall cracks with spackling, replaces the screen on our screened porch or fixes pipes that are leaking. One year, that actually did occur. When they came, we happened to have a pipe leaking in the wall of the room above our garage. He cut a hole in the wall, climbed in while another friend held a flashlight, found the leaking pipe, repaired it, climbed back out of the hole and within minutes, had the hole in the wall completely repaired and repainted.

Today I was thinking of his life-saving heroics as I was running through a park near our house and it made me think too of the health of one of our other dear friends, who has recently had a close call with the big C, but who is apparently going to be okay. I ran by these four young people who appeared to be of college age, just out strolling their dogs in the park.

After they left and I had run a while longer, I thought: I wish I were brave enough and smart enough to do creative things. If I were, I would have asked those kids to bring their dogs over to a place on the grass and have us all sit down and I would have told them the story of how over three decades ago a group of my friends and I were around their age and we spent a lot of time together at college, as they were. Then when we graduated, we did not let our friendships end, but we kept working at them and now there are around a dozen of us who remain like family.

Kirk and Nancy are among those friends, as is the one of our friends who recently had a health scare. If I could have set those kids down and talked to them, I would have told them how important it is to stay in touch with your friends and how much joy it will bring you as the years go by. You never know what is going to happen and it helps so much to share the pain and joy with people who know your whole life story.

If you have lifelong friends, you have surely occasionally speculated on which of you might be the first to leave the rest behind. Of course, we don’t dwell on such things, but if you are like me, it crosses your mind. When we were recently getting text updates on our friend’s health, Tanga and I would look at one other and sometimes tear up, not saying much, but I know she was probably thinking something similar to what I was: this is the way things begin to unravel.

I would have told those kids, life is finite and precious; and your friends can figuratively be lifesavers as the years go by, or if you are fortunate enough to have a friend like my friend Kirk Evans, you will have a friend who is literally a lifesaver.

Happy Father’s Day Kirk Evans, aka Life Saver!