My longtime friend Bob Peters (not his real name) came back into my life this summer.

When I say “longtime friend,” I’m not kidding. We first met in 1970 when he was hired as a news announcer at the radio station where I was working nights. We worked together for about a year, then he was fired and then I was fired.

My firing was “better” than his. I, at least, was called into the manager’s office to be told my career in radio had hit an iceberg. He found out when he came into work one morning and some other guy was working at his desk. When he asked the guy what he was doing, the guy replied, “I’m the new news director,” which came as a huge surprise to Peters who was, at that time, evidently, the old news director.

Yeah, it seems management had covered all the bases except telling Peters not to report to work … ever again. He did get the last laugh, sort of, by showing up at the company Christmas party four months later as the date of someone who still worked there.

By the time we had both been fired, we were really good friends and, as such, stayed in touch. He moved to Syracuse, and then I moved to Syracuse. He moved to Vermont, then Idaho, then Utah, then back to Idaho. I, however, stayed in Syracuse.

Through all his moving, we never lost contact. For years, we had the remarkable habit of specifically getting in touch with each other when something bad happened to one or the other, or both, of us.

We went on like that until 1991, when we stopped getting in touch with each other. Nothing happened, that I knew of. I lost his address, and I couldn’t remember how to spell his real name. (You thought I was joking about Bob Peters not being his real name, didn’t you?)

Every so often, I tried to track him down through Facebook and other social media, but I got nowhere.

Then, this past summer, I was sitting on our deck here in Maine (having eventually moved), feeding the chipmunks, when the phone rang and the voice on the other end asked, “Is this the one and only Scotty James from WGVA hit radio in Geneva, New York?” Only a handful of people knew that was the name I used on the air, so I was appropriately stunned when I realized it had to be Peters.

He, too, had tried off and on over the years to locate me, but this time, he said, a voice was nagging at him to get in touch “right now.” He somehow remembered that my daughter Alison’s name was spelled with one “L” and, after calling numerous phone numbers, he tracked her down and got my phone number.

We spent some time catching up, and remembering stuff, before he asked me about my health. I told him I had cancer, and when he asked what kind, I told him multiple myeloma, and he became the eleventy-seventh person to ask me what the heck that was. I told him, then he told me he had cancer also, in his case skin cancer (which he has subsequently had taken care of).

It became apparent, then, why he had felt so pressured into actually tracking me down this time. It was a little spooky, but in a good way.

Since I found out I was sick, I have, almost without realizing it, been looking for positive reasons that I got multiple myeloma. Being able to help people through this column has been the biggest plus, but here was another. It was sort of a Reader’s Digest/Paul Harvey experience — like opening your back door to find the dog you lost two years ago sitting there waiting for you.

We have been keeping in touch now that we’ve come back together. Of course, right now I owe him a letter, but… Oh, if you want to see what he looks like, and have Netflix, or a similar service, he appeared in an episode of “The X-Files,” playing, of all things, an Idaho TV newscaster, which is what he had done for a living for years. It’s Season 6, Episode 2, episode 120 overall, if you’re that interested.

Anyway, I’m not saying we would not have reconnected if I didn’t get cancer, all I’m saying is that we tried, off and on, to get in touch for more than 20 years, and didn’t succeed until now. I’m just sayin’.

Jim Arnold is a former copy editor for the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. To read more about his journey through cancer, visit his blog, findingthepony.blogspot.com.

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