Hey, you. You there with the 60-hour-a-week job, the home you can barely afford, the kids who can’t stay out of trouble. You with all those preoccupations and plans put on hold. Have you talked with your best friend lately? Did you even make the Christmas call this year?

You didn’t, I know. You might have talked with him around the time the Sox looked good for the pennant, but that was a short-lived period. A few brief conversations, some laughs over memories and promises to get together. That was it, wasn’t it? You haven’t talked to him since.

Best friends are funny things. At once the most important elements of your life and the easiest to put off. So trustworthy that you are absolutely sure they will always be there. And thus, you can put off that visit another day.

Me, I’m lucky. The best friend a guy could have works with me every night in the newsroom. At least, he did until the unpredictable hand of sickness reached out to give him a shake.

It was a Sunday night when I got the call. Randy was in intensive care, blood clots in his heart, brain and stomach. I thought the worst when I went over. I tried to think about how strange the world would be without him in it. It was an image I couldn’t summon. Randy is a guy who walks the walk in a universe with a lot of big talk.

He zips across the newsroom like electricity. In the space of a few seconds, he can hit a killer falsetto on a lame song from “Grease,” make a normally staid editor giggle, catch up with the sports scores and hurl a well-rehearsed insult in my direction. At the same time, he’s catching errors on the news pages, making the photos look as sharp as they’ll ever look and bailing the paper out of one calamity or another.

Randy is The Man. A classic Red Sox fan on top of the world one inning, full of gloom the next. An unshakable horseshoe champ who prefers the backyard with his wife and son to any other place on the planet. Give the guy a choice between an exotic island cruise and a backyard barbecue, he’ll take the latter every time.

Randy is the guy you want at your party. In one sleek set of moves he’s inspiring a crowd to dance and cleverly coaxing the keys from the guy who’s drunk enough to believe he can still drive. He’s the one who keeps the peace and listens to the drunken tales of woe.

Randy’s the guy who will help you move even when he has better things to do. He’s the one who will answer your call in the middle of the night if you’ve got trouble. Randy’s got your back.

So, that night just weeks ago on the way to the hospital, my jaw was tight and my thoughts were grim. It was unfathomable to think of the newsroom or any other place without him in it. I steeled myself as I rode the elevator to intensive care. I braced myself because other friends have flown before.

He was lying in a bed, his body jammed full of tubes. A machine beeped above him and his wife and son sat close by. But Randy was awake and almost beaming. He held up his hands with the patches and bruises and needles stuck everywhere.

“Check it out,” he croaked, in as happy a voice that can be croaked. “They say I’ve got what Ted Bruschi’s got.”

Yep, a heart with a hole where a hole doesn’t belong, and my buddy found a way to be chipper about it. He was knocked down flat by a fluke defect but came up swinging with a sports angle.

That’s another thing about Randy. He’s no whiner. I don’t recall him complaining one bit during the ordeal. He couldn’t eat solid food. He couldn’t drink beer. He couldn’t leave his house once he was sent home, and he sure as hell couldn’t work. Randy’s a tough guy. And he’s glad to be alive.

For me, it was another reminder that anything and anyone can be taken away at any time. I still fire nasty insults at my buddy, because that’s what buddies do. I just try to do it more frequently these days, and I appreciate his snappy retorts a little bit more.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. Visit his blog at www.sunjournal.com.

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