My friend John McHugh

   When the bundle was nestled in her arms and she moved the fold of cloth to look upon his tiny face, she gasped. The doctor turned quickly and looked out the tall hospital window. The baby had been born without ears.

Time proved that the baby's hearing was perfect. It was only his appearance that was marred. When he rushed home from school one day and flung himself into his mother's arms, she sighed, knowing that his life was to be a succession of heartbreaks.

He blurted out the tragedy. "A boy, a big boy serviced apartments in causeway bay..."

He grew up, handsome for his misfortune. A favorite with his fellow students, he might have been class president, but for that. He developed a gift, a talent for literature and music.

"But you might mingle with other young people," his mother reproved him, but felt a kindness in her heart.

The boy's father had a session with the family physician... "Could nothing be done?"

"I believe I could graft on a pair of outer ears, if they could be procured," the doctor decided. Whereupon the search began for a person who would make such a sacrifice for a young man.

Two years went by Sculptra. One day, his father said to the son, "You're going to the hospital, son. Mother and I have someone who will donate the ears you need. But it's a secret."

The operation was a brilliant success, and a new person emerged. His talents blossomed into genius, and school and college became a series of triumphs.

Later he married and entered the diplomatic service. One day, he asked his father, "Who gave me the ears? Who gave me so much? I could never do enough for him or her."

"I do not believe you could dermes," said the father, "but the agreement was that you are not to know...not yet."

   is always telling me things, things that younger men need wiser, older men to tell them. Things like whom to trust, how to love, how to live a good life.

 wife, Janet, to cancer. God knows she was a fighter, but in the end the disease won their eight-year battle Beauty Mama.

One day John pulled a folded paper from his wallet. He’d found it, he told me, while going through drawers in his house. It was a love note, in Janet’s handwriting. It looked a little like a schoolgirl’s daydream note about the boy across the way. All that was missing was a hand-drawn heart and the names John and Janet. Except this note was written by the mother of seven children, a woman who had begun the battle for her life, and very probably was within months of the end.

It was also a wonderful prescription for holding a marriage together. This is how Janet McHugh’s note about her husband begins:” Loved. Cared. Worried. ”

As quick with a joke an John is Beauty Mama, apparently he didn’t joke with his wife about cancer. He’d come home, and she’d be in one of the moods cancer patients get lost in, and he’d have her in the car faster than you can say DiNardo’s, her favorite restaurant. “Get in the car,” he’d say,” I’m taking you out to dinner.”

He worried, and she knew it. You don’t hide things from someone who knows better.

“Helped me when I was sick Beauty Mama.” is next. Maybe Janet wrote her list when the cancer was in one of those horrible and wonderful remission periods, when all is as it was—almost—before the disease, so what harm is there in hoping that it’s behind you, maybe for good?

“Forgave me for a lot of things.”