I called my old friend Arnie this morning to change plans. Rather than have him drive the twenty miles or so between our houses I told him I'd visit him instead. Somewhere in the night, in some odd twist of chemistry, chemo had taken a break, giving me back a body with some stamina, sharper reflexes, and a spring in its feet. I woke up roaring with well-being, determined to get out the door before the effect wore off.

Arnie has been my friend and collaborator for almost forty years. In scores of projects for public radio and TV we've helped each other strengthen a story-line, enrich a joke, or give a title the perfect twist. We were each other's best man and, since the day we met, by chance or some deep, unspoken covenant, we've never strayed farther from each other than a half-hour's drive.

I've never told him this, but in my many moments of depression, Arnie has also been my getaway from gloom. For me time with Arnie is time spent in the pure air of the present, swapping stories as we raft down the currents of our latest jobs, laughing through the spray and thunder with a big dog by our side.

For a dozen years my Golden Retriever Ben kept us company; now Arnie's stout Lab Floyd flops at our feet whenever I drop by. It's been years since our careers gave us the chance to work together across his kitchen table, but its old worn surface is still there, ready to carry us away.

I pulled up in my car to his front door and looked at myself in the rear view mirror before going in. Give or take a few scratches, I saw, as I always had, the calm, familiar face of a survivor. A lifetime of close calls from childhood attacks of typhus and salmonella in Mexico to surgery on my aging heart in Boston, had done nothing to change that look—an appearance of everyday good health that said, "Nothing to worry about here, folks. Move along, I'm all right."  

We talked for a while and then:

"So, how are you feeling?"

Arnie's question caught me by surprise. It was the question I'd been avoiding from sick callers for over a week. Slumped in pajamas on my living room couch with a sweaty glass of ice water in my hands, I never knew what to say. Especially to those I'd fallen out of touch with who, for all I knew, were taking my illness as their last chance to say goodbye. All I could read in their eyes was pity or discomfort that their good health when I had cancer was some sort of a crime.

"Are you okay?" He sounded worried.

Arnie had never cornered me with his concern like that before; and never, that I can recall, brought up anything I didn't want to discuss. Behind the squint in his eyes, though, there was something quite different I saw—something vast and calm, patient and free of judgment as an open road. It wasn't  condolence he was showing, it was compassion, and the second I recognized it I heard an honest answer form in my head.

"How am I doing, really? I don't know and, dear friend of forty years, it scares me."

I didn't say it out loud. And there was nothing more he needed to say. The distance between us just seemed to collapse, that's all. It stunned me to realize how much we loved each other. Like a spent breath I'd held too long, the tension of the past week left my lungs and I felt fatigue fill every inch of me.

Back in the car a short while later, I took my time buckling my seat belt and starting the engine. I looked in the mirror and noticed two small cold sores starting to form on either side of my mouth that I don't think had been there before. Nurse Jill had warned me my white blood cell counts would be dangerously low by now, and I needed to get home and back in bed; my energy was gone and chemo was coming to reclaim me. 

I noticed a change in my expression, too. Call it "chemo eyes," the unexpected upside of the mental fuzziness the nurses called "chemo brain" and that I had already experienced. The tides of chemo had a way of sharpening my vision sometimes, of highlighting things that otherwise tumbled by. If I looked long enough and with kindness I could see them. There it was in my eyes—perhaps the deepest part of me, my silent partner from the start—my own body, taking more damage than it had ever shown me before. All my life it had served me, absorbing every blow, without a word of complaint. I wasn't sure I was ready for the stories it had to tell.

Spencer the Golden Retriever, photo by Brandt Luke Zorn,

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