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Let me try to squeeze one more column out of my friendship tour, please, and I promise to move on next week. Besides, I owe some of you an update on the cancer thing. Some of you knew, of course, that I put together these tours, the first in 2022 and the second over three weeks in late May and June, because I was feeling the effects of age and ailments and wanted, needed, to see the faces of people who matter to me.

I’ve been saying that Chuck’s Excellent Friendship Tours were not farewell tours, and by saying that it came off to some of you as maybe just that. I started thinking it, too. Was this the last time I’d see those high school classmates and college fraternity buddies, those wonderful people I worked alongside for decades? I turned 75 in May, and I went off on a three-week, 5,007-mile road trip brooding — I have wasted too much of my life brooding — about the scans and imaging and doctors waiting to tell me “Time’s Up” when I got home.



ADVERTISEMENT Well, it’s not nearly so dark as my brooding led me to fear. “Your cancer is stable. That’s good news,” the oncologist said this week after the test results came in.

“OK,” I said. “I can live with that.” I am under orders to take better care of myself, and that includes brooding less (and leaving behind some of the tastes I acquired while roaming the South, such as biscuits and gravy for breakfast).

I will try to face the inevitable challenges of turning 76, then 77 — can I make it to 80.

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