As in all things, it is important to remain grounded and retain good humor. While I have been fortunate enough to have a supportive family, I have found that one particular activity has been especially effective in reminding me about who I am and what I aspired to as a younger man. I don’t do it often, but it gives me a chance to largely forgo maudlin conversations and getting sucked into pseudo-therapy or endless medical recommendations or even just additional reminders of what I am dealing with every day. I position this, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its relative infrequency, at the top of my list of desirable, repeatable events: dinner with old friends.

The friends referenced need to be of the “knew you when” variety. While dinner with new good friends is terrific (or coffee, or whatever friends do when they are just hanging out these days), such new friends are likely in the thick of it with you right now. It’s a different vibe. Spending time with them is great, meaningful and hopefully supportive in the best ways. But they cannot bring with them that sense of history, served best by those who you have not seen much of in years or at least long enough not to be deeply associated with the current process of therapy, from diagnosis and beyond.

This evening I had been out to dinner with four college roommates with whom I remain in touch and who still live locally (at least when their jobs don’t have them in some more exotic locale). The timing was great, as one just flew in from overseas yesterday and another is flying out tomorrow for the East Coast and the third, nearly on par with the travel obstacles, drove in from the Westside of LA to meet with the rest of us downtown. The locale was a

nice restaurant on a rooftop, offering great views of the city devoid (at least on a Sunday evening) of any A-list celebrity distractions. And the B- or C-listers kept their photo ops fairly calm while the band focused on its 70s R and B grooves. A terrific setting for our group, allowing us to focus on funny stories, industry chatter and reminiscing about old times.

While I mentioned later, as we prepared to split off and hunt down our various rides, that I should have trimmed my crazy beard because their decent grooming made me look old (and probably mildly unstable, I should have added), the fact is that the evening had made me feel younger and heartier just by association. It wasn’t just hanging around with a collection of handsome fellows; attractive people are a dime a dozen and I could have just waited at the bar for that effect if it would work. But being with these guys brings us right back to a simpler time. It allows us all, I think, to just be ourselves and hang out and be happy with the fact that we are still able to see those same guys we were 25 years ago.

I have been especially lucky this year with friends coming through town. It helps that I live in a big city that has a lot of reasons to attract visitors, either as a travel hub or an actual destination. Just this month, three friends from high school have passed through and, while I only was able to spend time with the first one because of my own scheduling issues (and a sad lack of advance notice from the latter two, hint hint) it offered the same blissful transportation to another time and place that my college buddies delivered. And a mere couple of weeks before that I had the privilege of spending a few hours with another dear college friend on campus, exploring the entirely updated and escalated buildings where our old classrooms and facilities used to be. That was exceptionally meaningful, as my treatment was interfering with my ability to attend his wedding, and I was particularly down about that issue.

There is no reasonable way to expect that a constant stream of old, close friends will be coming through town. Travel is expensive and the economy, while up for many people these days, is still hard on most of us. So I am grateful for the social connections I have been able to maintain and foster through digital media, and the good fortune of enough local friends who for whatever reason I usually only see on rare occasions.

This is the time to make a little more effort to seek out those old friends, those good friends you miss seeing face to face, those brothers and sisters from some time in the past when life sure as heck seemed a lot easier and probably in many ways more fun or adventurous. At least those are some of the things we tell ourselves about the past; we had it right back then, or terribly, amazingly, comically wrong. We were free, or at least too naive to realize otherwise. But we can still laugh and smile and live in the moment. Maybe not exactly this moment, but maybe.