A dear friend ...

... died Tuesday after a third try at a replacement heart valve. "It's not good to be a star case before the med school!" Brian Meehan wrote in his last e-mail to me. I guess he was right. Heart surgery just didn't agree with him.

Brian was someone I reached out to on a lark, someone who had found success in my field long before I was born and whom I had admired as a writer for years. I was in need of some professional focus, so I offered to treat him to lunch at Portland's Pearl Bakery so I could pick his brain. We grabbed a table by the window, and for three hours, I was walking on air. It was like meeting a celebrity only to realize, with great relief, that they're fabulously down-to-earth.

I told him about my career goals and life plans, and he listened as though a young person had never had such lofty ambitions. In return, he opened up about all sorts of thing strangers don't usually share at a first lunch: the time he spent in New York City right after Sept. 11; his forays into the dating world as a man of a certain age; and his love for his place outside the city, in Scappoose. We covered the Blazers and the Mariners, Beaver football and Beaver baseball, and I think we even ventured into military history before the date was over.

I'll miss the lunches we never got to share, and remember the one we did with fondness.

I sent him a good luck card last week in anticipation of his surgery. "Hopefully, the third time's the charm," I scrawled above a heart. He never got it.