Apocalypse Now

I hate to repeat myself, but the news is repeating itself so loudly that I feel compelled to follow suit.

Today’s post was going to be about something else entirely. Something funny and nostalgic. But both ongoing and very recent events have overwhelmed my ability and desire to amuse, and looking back in time is too difficult when the horrors of the present and the future feel so inescapable.

So, I’m afraid you’re about to read, not for the first time on this blog, about my outraged resignation over the madness of American’s gun culture. And also, even more cheerily, we’ll revisit my conviction that the planet is in an inexorable downward spiral. One that makes me glad I’m nearing 60 and may not—hopefully will not—live to experience the worst of it.

What’s that? You’re thinking, “The guy posts nothing for nearly two months, only to climb back onto this nihilistic soapbox?!” You suddenly remembered something else you need to do right now, somewhere else you need to be?

I get that. I don’t blame you, if you’d rather not read on. On many days I can push the abundant signs of impending catastrophe far enough back in my brain to try to write entertainingly about the mundanities of my daily life or the absurd manifestations of pop culture. Maybe the next time opportunity and motivation coincide to place me at the keyboard, I’ll be in a lighter mood. Watch this space. Have a good day. Catch you later.

But, should you choose to keep reading, here’s what’s on my mind today.

My current mental clusterf*** began yesterday at work, when I checked my phone to see if I’d gotten any texts. (Not that I’m that popular, mind you. But, for example, Lynn sometimes writes to remind me to call my parents, or to pay a bill, or to do something else for which I seem to require backup memory.) I’d received no texts, but I had gotten an alert from the BBC that two members of an American TV news team had been shot and killed while on camera.

(A quick aside: Although I welcome the BBC’s interest in keeping me informed on world events, I continue to find it ironic that an overseas news service frequently provides my first word on all the horrible things that are happening in my own country. While I never asked for the Beeb’s updates, they started appearing on my phone when I downloaded the BBC news app. I sometimes wonder if it’s the Brits’ way of saying, “Hey, you were the ones who insisted on breaking from us and going your own way. Be careful what you wish for.”)

Anyway, back to that news item. It’s a huge international story already now, of course, just a day later. How an asshole maniac with a legally obtained gun and anger-management issues did what so many identically described Americans before him have done—killed innocent people just because he wanted to and could, given this country’s laughably toothless gun laws—but this time did it to a reporter and a videographer while they were covering a story live on camera. And then how the gunman proudly posted the video to his Facebook page. Already this morning there was a commentary in the Washington Post about how this is the New Face of Violence, in which homicidal narcissists share the glory of their bloodletting with all their imagined fans via social media.

I was thinking about this earlier this morning, driving home from a morning run in DC. My mind was all over the place, ranging from the practical to balancing social responsibility against personal safety.

The gunman in the Virginia killings had worn a body camera, posted the video to Facebook, and faxed to a news source a bitter, incoherent and self-contradictory manifesto. Wow, I thought. I don’t even know where you’d buy a body camera. I’m not on Facebook. I have no idea how to post video footage anywhere. Also, when’s the last time I sent a fax? What’s that procedure for that? Does all this mean I’m just a Luddite doofus, or that I’m, conversely, admirably ill-suited to conducting 21st-century terrorism?

But then I came back to what, if anything, I can do to fight gun violence, or at least to meaningfully voice my contempt for the status quo. As I’ve written before in this space, the National Rifle Association is so rich and powerful, and its grasp on the balls (or lady parts) of federal and state lawmakers so tight, as to make abundantly forlorn any hope of enacting significant restrictions on firearms purchases and use. It didn’t happen after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Charleston, you name the bloody tragedy. So why would it happen now? But what I’ve personally wanted to do for a long time is to slap a pro-gun control bumper sticker onto my car. Today, I am thinking my sticker should unambiguously state my true stance and read: “Repeal the Second Amendment!”

The arguments against doing so remain compelling, though. This is a nation of gun nuts— some of them less forgiving of even a little thing like a lone bumper sticker than are others. I frankly would expect my car to be vandalized were I to scratch this itch. I’d anticipate anything from keying the paint to smashing the windshield or shooting out a tire. I wouldn’t rule out violence against me, either, whether in the midst of a provoked argument or simply while pumping gas next to a highway that afforded my assailant a quick getaway.

See, this is why my admiration is boundless for the trailblazers, the whistle-blowers, the squeaky wheels in situations when making even the faintest of murmurs might constitute a death wish. I thank God (well, agnostically) for the likes of King, Gandhi, Mandela, Parks, Schindler, Jackie Robinson, and so many others who’ve helped institutionalize whatever fairness and justice exists in the world.

But as for me, hey, I’m just trying to stay alive. And to save my household from huge automotive repair costs at the least, and Lynn from widowhood at the worst.

Although, again, I hope to die before the plupart of the shit really hits the fan.

Which brings me to more happy news from the BBC.  As I was sitting in my car this morning—envisioning both the initial rush of receiving my defiant bumper sticker in the mail and my sheepish decision shortly thereafter to stick it in a drawer, so as not to place huge targets on my vehicle and forehead just to make a point—I heard a breaking story on my local public radio station’s broadcast of the BBC News Hour about the discovery in Austria of as many as 50 decomposing bodies in the back of a locked truck. They were thought to be Syrian refugees, who had fled unthinkable conditions in their own country only to be fatally victimized by human traffickers who had no regard or use for their clients once they’d gotten their money.

The BBC newsman was very effective at painting a picture with language: the unspeakable conditions inside the truck, the overpowering stench, the difficulty of rendering a quick and accurate body count with the bodily breakdowns so advanced and the assault on the senses so overwhelming. This, in turn, got me to thinking about the vastness of ongoing refugee crises in multiple corners of the globe—Africa and Asia as well as Europe.

Too many wars.  Too much human fallout. Too many conflicting government agendas for enough to get done to address the problems.

From there, the head begins to spin. At least mine does. The world’s population continues to grow exponentially, even as the climate steadily warms and finite resources such as water and fossil fuels keep being expended and alternative energy sources languish. California is parched. Wildfires rage throughout the western United States. Instances of mass starvation multiply around the world. Oh, and the threat of nuclear holocaust remain, too! We need Superman. We get Donald Trump. And it’s symptomatic of the way things are going—of the way reaction has replaced reason and candor trumps (pun intended) considered thought—that, to far too many people, the Donald Trumps of the world serve as superhero stand-ins.

So, yes, here I am today, repeating myself. America’s gun violence is insane—and inexorable. The Earth has survived external threats from wayward comets and all those UFOs people keep sighting, but it continues to implode from the damage done by its human inhabitants. I’m sorry to replay this broken record, but, let's face it, the song remains the same.

I’ll end with this. Last Sunday, I eagerly watched the initial episode of Fear the Walking Dead, a spinoff of and prequel to the TV series The Walking Dead, which I’ve been faithfully watching nearly since its inception a few years ago. Both shows are about a zombie apocalypse. But whereas the original series lurched into chaos that already was deeply in progress, the new series tracks the breakdown of society from the beginning, just as a lethal virus is spreading and the undead menace is quickly growing to the point of no return.

When it debuted, I saw the initial series as escapist fare. Scary, yes, but also reassuring, in that nothing going on in the real world was quite as bad as being relentlessly pursued by roving hordes of soulless cannibals. I’m watching this new series through different eyes, though, with a connective focus. In real life, the virus is aloft. There’s no cure in sight. Utter chaos appears inevitable, if on a longer timeline than that on TV.

Which is why sometimes, especially on days like today, I wonder if slapping a bumper sticker on my car that might get me killed really is such a bad idea. I mean, given what I might otherwise live to see.

               

   

Tongue-Tied

After dinner the other night, I pulled out a pen and pad and told Lynn I wanted to take some background notes on her fledgling efforts to learn Spanish. “I’m thinking of writing a blog post,” I explained.

“Are you going to mention what a huge baby you’re being about it?” she asked.

Rather than get all defensive, I conceded that this was exactly my intention—albeit while adding a bit of context.

In the evenings for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been catching up on my newspaper and magazine reading while Lynn has been doing Spanish-language exercises on her iPad on a website called Duolingo. She’s sitting on the couch in our sunroom and I’m in a chair at the other end of the coffee table. I’ll hear a woman’s voice say something in Spanish, then Lynn types something in response.

It wasn’t long before this routine started really annoying me. Initially I stewed silently, but then I asked Lynn if she could turn down the volume. I was finding the Spanish-speaking woman’s voice distracting, I told Lynn—even though I couldn’t quite make out the words, let alone translate them.

I wasn’t completely lying. I’m a slow reader, with mediocre retention at the best of times. Hearing Senora Duolingo periodically enunciate was proving to be at least as distracting as it is for me to read while the TV’s on, or while Lynn’s talking on the phone. I’m not the greatest multi-tasker. But distraction wasn’t the primary thing.

You’ve heard of countries that have mutual nonaggression pacts? Well, it’s always seemed to me that Lynn and I have a de facto mutual non-ambition pact. It is this unwritten treaty that she lately has been violating, in my eyes, by flagrantly engaging in intellectual betterment, to the detriment of my slack-jawed contentment with my own unchallenging life of the mind. 

There are many reasons Lynn and I have been a good match for going on 23 years of marriage, ranging from our similar interests and sensibilities to mutual attraction and shared distastes. But a big part of it, too, is that we’re intellectually compatible. We’re certainly not stupid, but neither one of us is a genius by any stretch. We each have our areas of particular interest and expertise. I know a lot more about things like history and geography than Lynn does, for example, while her knowledge of medicine, anatomy, nutrition and veterinary science far exceeds mine. It all kind of balances out.

I’m not saying we lack intellectual curiosity. Various things we read, or hear, or see pique our interest and prompt discussions that can get fairly deep at times. We’re not total dullards. But it’s not as if either of us ever is going to discover the cure for cancer, or even come up with a brilliant way to make a fortune. That’s partly because we’re not super smart, but it’s at least as much because all the lab activity and drawing of business plans that would be required to accomplish those things strikes us as Too Much Damn Work.

What’s that saying about the supposedly world-altering power of boldly asking “Why not” rather than passively stopping at “Why”?  Lynn and I look at people who are really driven—who are constantly busting their asses in single-minded pursuit of a goal—and ask, “Where’s the damn fire?”

It’s not like we’re burdens on society. Separately and together, we’ve been self-sufficient our entire adult lives, earning paychecks and never moving into our parents’ basement or onto the public assistance rolls. But moving up to the career ladder—or even drawing one, for that matter—hasn’t been our agenda. I’ve been in the same job for 15 years now because I like it pretty well, it’s sufficiently remunerative, it’s not unduly taxing and I’m not a big fan of new challenges. Lynn’s job history has been more varied, but she’s motivated by an identical desire to make working as painless as possible, as we wind down the road to the ultimate, glorious nirvana of retirement.

So, where does learning Spanish come into this? Another way in which Lynn and I historically have been two peas in a middling pod is shame of our monolinguality and concurrent refusal to do the work necessary to change it. Both Lynn and I took a lot of French in school, but we’ve retained virtually none of it. We’ve kind of hated ourselves for clinging to the island of English when seemingly everyone else in the world has managed to add our native tongue to their own, with maybe another language or two in thrown in for good measure.

Over the years, we’d periodically talk vaguely of immersing ourselves in French decades hence, when we were retired and didn’t have to append that mental burden to the cognitive demands of our day jobs.

Then, at some point, we started thinking that maybe Spanish was the language we should try to learn. We kept hearing that it’s easier to pick up than is any other foreign language, and “easy” is a word that’s very much in our wheelhouse. Also, even in the cosmopolitan Washington, DC, area, with its embassies and international organizations, one is far likelier to hear Spanish spoken on the street, at malls and in convenience stores than French or any other non-English tongue. I got to thinking about how I’d love to know what the construction guys at the 7-Eleven are saying, even it should turn out to be, “That dorky gringo has no muscle tone whatsoever! How is that possible?” At least then I could respond in Spanish, “Your mother has no muscle tone!” Not that that would make much sense, but I’d feel good being able to issue a retort. At least until the heckler beat me up for dishonoring his family.

In an uncharacteristic burst of effort, Lynn and I actually went so far, maybe 10 years ago, to enroll in an adult education course offered by the county one night a week at a local elementary school. The teacher, however, turned out to be this crazy Cuban women who thought the best way to teach Spanish to novice adults was complete immersion—no English at all. That went precisely as well as might be expected. Which suited us, because we quickly tired of taking notes, and drilling each other at home on nights when we could be watching TV.

That was the last attempt, half-hearted or not, by either of us to learn a foreign language until Lynn’s recent foray took me by surprise. In the meantime, I’d happily returned to the notion that we’d revisit the subject in retirement, or never. Then Gabriela entered Lynn’s life.

She’s a woman in Lynn’s Thursday-night yoga class. I haven’t met her. She’s from Uruguay and teaches Spanish at a private school. Her husband works at the International Monetary Fund. (These are the types of background details that brought out my pen and paper. Not that they’re particularly necessary—I could’ve simply written, “A woman from her yoga class is teaching Lynn Spanish”—but I pride myself on my reportorial skills, if not my foreign-language acumen.)

So, Gabriela somehow broke her ankle several weeks ago and is laid up at home this summer. One afternoon, Lynn brought her one of the variety of awesome soups that she makes. (Which could become the basis of a multimillion-dollar business for Lynn, if wasn’t for all the aforementioned work that would be required.) Gabriela and Lynn got to talking about all sorts of things that day, including Lynn’s interest in learning Spanish. Whereupon Gabriela offered to teach her—no charge, although perhaps with the ongoing expectation of soup. Whereupon, in turn, Lynn—the traitor!—assented.

Even worse, from my slacker point of view,  the missus has been zealously applying herself ever since, with a fervor the two of us more typically apply to handicapping contestants on The Next Food Network Star, or bitching about the broken American political system that we’re doing nothing personally to fix, or dreamily discussing our carefree retirement.

Which brings me back to those language exercises on the iPad. Per my request, Lynn has cut back on the volume, to the point where all I can hear from my chair are the low murmurs of Senora Duolingo and faint bells that sound when Lynn is responding to something. What continues to resonate much more loudly for me, however, is the feeling that my wife is violating our mutual non-ambition pact by aggressively pursuing something that seems incredibly hard to me. I feel kind of betrayed.

 

And yes, I’m being a huge baby about it. I’m trying to be less of one. Also, I’m trying to look at the upside. I mean, if she keeps at it, Lynn one day will be able to tell off the Latino guys at the 7-Eleven if they’re dissing me. Of course, on the other hand, she might find it amusing to use her Spanish to commiserate and pile on. Payback for my language truculence, perhaps.

How the hell would I know which she was doing? I wouldn’t. The thought annoys me. Not enough to take up Spanish, though.

    

Talk of the Town

A Starbucks queue is one of the unlikelier places, in the 21st century, for a spontaneous face-to-face conversation to break out. Anybody under 40 is staring down at his or her smartphone. Most people over that age either are doing the same or, like me, are crabbily wondering exactly when standing idly for a couple of minutes became unendurable.

There’s something about a quadruple homicide, though, that gets mouths to moving.

I’m referencing here a recent crime in DC that was noteworthy enough in its heinousness, but particularly in its specific location, to make not just the local but the national news. A rich industrialist and his wife, their 10-year-old son, and a 57-year-old housekeeper were held captive and later (after $40,000 had been delivered at the threatened homeowner’s behest) murdered in their own home, which is located in an upscale neighborhood in Northwest between the National Cathedral and the US Naval Observatory. The residence then was set afire in an unsuccessful attempt to cover up the crimes.

It didn’t take law enforcement long to link the murders to a former employee of the slain industrialist. His whereabouts quickly were traced to Brooklyn and then back to DC, where he was arrested in Northeast and now is in custody.

Even in Washington—a city well-used to all manner of crime, deceit and spectacle—the slaying of four people, including a child, within a half-mile of the vice president’s residence was attention-getting. So much so that it prompted two smartphone-wielding young women—20-ish, I’d say—to look up from their screens in the Starbucks line on New Mexico Avenue NW, near American University, and verbally express their shock to each other. Whereupon a woman roughly 50 years their senior offered them her Washington Post to Read All About It in old-school newsprint. As one of the young woman gingerly held the paper in front of her, like a dusty musket at a firearms museum, and read the headline—“Suspect in Quadruple Killings Captured in DC, Police Say”—I chimed in with, “Thank God the guy just had to have pizza.”

This was because the big break in the case was a fingerprint left on a Domino’s box by the man later arrested. According to police, just as the husband had been forced by his captor to order thousands of dollars in cash delivered to the residence, the wife had been forced, the night before she and the others were killed, to order a couple of pies from the Domino’s in the nearby Tenleytown neighborhood.  

(My friend Joey in Charlotte later commented by email that, for a man with such a flamboyant approach to killing, the alleged murderer has surprisingly pedestrian taste in pizza. My response was that you’d think a guy who was plotting out such an elaborate crime would’ve thought to pack himself a sandwich.)

The four of us in the Starbucks line last Friday morning agreed that the whole pizza thing did not exactly bespeak “criminal mastermind.” The older woman opined that death would be too good for the accused—torture being a necessary antecedent to capital punishment. The younger women seemed noncommittal—possibly because they don’t believe in the death penalty, but more likely because the incensed senior spit out the word “torture” with a demented glee that suggested she likely has wet dreams about Dick Cheney.

I elected not to share with the others the fact that I’d just completed a morning run past the murder scene—lest I seem, like the older lady, a little too personally invested in the whole sordid affair. But the fact is, I’d parked my car in Northwest that morning and set out for Woodland Drive—a street I knew well from past runs—with the express purpose of finding out exactly which house we were talking about here.

It wasn’t hard to spot. The patrol car out front, the abundant crime-scene tape, the burned-out shell behind that tape, and the scent of smoke in the air all conspired to give the location away. So, now I’ve got another Murder House past which to run on my morning rounds of the city and its close-in suburbs. As I’d noted in my blog post of June 2, 2012, “Grim-Reality TV,” it’s a tour of tragedy that also includes, but is not limited to, the Maryland house in which an ex-State Department employee bludgeoned his family to death in the 1970s, the wooded hillside in Rock Creek Park where slain internist Chandra Levy’s remains were found in 2002, and the Northwest DC house in which a promising Indian-American poet—a tenant of prize-winning novelist Howard Norman—stabbed to death her two-year-old son and then herself in 2003.

I’d brought my own Washington Post to Starbucks from home, so once I got my coffee I read the article the older woman had pointed out. I’d already heard the basics about the arrest on the radio, but the newspaper story held other interesting details. For one thing, the accused—one  Daron Dylon Wint, age 34—was traveling in a caravan when arrested, with a white box truck ahead of him. The two guys in the truck were believed to be relatives of Wint’s, and the truck contained “at least $10,000 in cash.” I’m not an attorney, but I sense that detail could bode ill for the defendant at the time of trial.

Speaking of the trial, the other thing in the article that piqued my interest was the name of a one-time defense attorney of Wint’s who opined that his former client was “the last one I’d suspect of anything like this.” The lawyer’s name was Robin Ficker. As Joey put it in his email to me, “That Robin Ficker.”

Ficker is well known to sports fans like Joey because he achieved regional infamy decades ago as a heckler at Washington Bullets (now Wizards) basketball games. He is better known now to his fellow Montgomery County, Maryland, residents, like me, as an insufferable blowhard who’s perpetually running for political office and petitioning against pretty much all forms of government taxation, no matter how essential they might be to things like maintaining the public order and keeping the bridges from collapsing.

I hadn’t realized until I read that article that Robin Ficker’s day job is defense attorney, which strikes me as a surprisingly constructive societal role for him to be playing, although Ficker himself undoubtedly sees it as one more way of screwing with The Man. I’d have guessed that a guy with Ficker’s public skill set might, rather, be the proprietor of a bullhorn company, or headmaster of a training academy for Tea Party candidates.

Ficker had represented Wint, according to the Post, in “about six minor criminal and traffic cases,” and hadn’t seen his former client in 10 years. “He’s not a match for this type of activity at all,” Ficker said of the murders, before adding that line about Wint being “the last one I would suspect.”

First of all, the last person I’d expect to commit murder would be a nun or the Dalai Lama, not a guy who was in need of constant representation for criminal and traffic offenses, however “minor.” But second of all, you’d think a local defense attorney might have caught wind of some of Wint’s more recent run-ins with the law, like threatening the life of his own father (who received a restraining order), punching and groping a woman at a bar, and being rousted out from behind a gas station dumpster, where he was found to be carrying a machete and a pellet gun.

Sure, Wint is innocent until proven guilty, and all that. But he’s not the last guy I’d suspect of the murders on Woodland Drive. I'm just sayin’.   

In fact, I may bring that up if I’m on standing line at a Starbucks during the trial. Because I have a hunch that the kinds of juicy details that tend to come out during public testimony will get people talking.

Final Edition

Around this same time 23 years ago, I was an unmarried features writer for the daily newspaper in Savannah. To the extent that I was known professionally at all in Georgia’s “Coastal Empire”—which wasn’t much, believe me—it was for my movie reviews. I tended to be quite sarcastic and take many liberties with language and decorum, which I was free to do because it was a terrible paper with lax standards, and anything I wrote ran pretty much unedited.

(I still think I may have been the first movie reviewer to opine as to why films had been assigned their ratings. Newsies earned a PG for “contributing the dull-inquency of minors.” The R rating of the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead may have owed to a bare-breasted corpse, as “the undead know no modesty.” Reviewers do this sort of thing all the time now. Where’s my credit? I’m still bitter.)

Anyway, reporting never was my strong suit, as I couldn’t hand-write quickly and had trouble reading my own scrawl. That meant that I lost the meaty parts of lots of quotes. I should have tape-recorded everything, which is what I do in my job now. I can’t remember exactly why I didn’t. I guess tighter deadlines were part of it. Also, a recorder would’ve been one more thing to carry, and I had no more hands then than the one that I have now.

The thing I hated doing the most was person-on-the-street interviews. Sitting alone in dark theaters was exactly my comfort level; abandoning my anonymity to walk up to strangers was its antithesis. But one day this week in 1992, I volunteered to drive down to couple of local malls to ask people their opinions. The reason was that Johnny Carson was retiring.

It goes without saying that the entire broadcasting landscape was hugely different then. The television networks still were king, with very little meaningful competition. “Media” was a word unto itself, not the lesser addendum to “social.” This week, people have been taking to Twitter and Facebook to share their thoughts about the end of David Letterman’s run on late-night TV. But back then, if you wanted to know what people thought about, say, Carson signing off from The Tonight Show after a quarter-century at its helm, you looked to newspapers, media and the boob tube, because reporters had to ask those questions for you. You had no way to ask them yourself.

I needed to ask people about Johnny. I couldn’t quite imagine the world without him. Not that I stayed up to watch him that often, or even taped him, though I did have a VCR. But when I did see him, both Johnny and the world he’d created around himself delighted me. He was so funny, and quick, and skilled at interviewing whoever sat in his guest chairs. His facial expressions and comic timing were perfect, whether he was serving as Don Rickles’ foil or a leopard from the San Diego Zoo was pawing at his scalp. His putdowns of buffoonish Ed McMahon, garish hornblower Doc Severinsen and bland saxophonist Tommy Newsom were hilarious. His over-the-top shtick as Carnac the Magnificent struck me as unfailingly, well, magnificent.

Let’s just say I didn’t get out much in high school or college. On any of those many nights when I wasn’t out on dates, however, I always could count on Johnny to provide me with laughs. As I got older, I saw his show less and read more about how he wasn’t the nicest or warmest guy in real life. He himself joked on camera about his divorces, but it seemed that he was divorced from people in more ways than that. Those details never much bothered me, though. In fact, it seemed to me that Carson in some ways was battling his very nature in order to entertain us. Anyway, I didn’t want to have a drink with Johnny. I wanted him ride Ed, the purported lush, for having drunk a few too many.

It wasn’t that I expected the people I’d be interviewing that day to feel as sad about Johnny’s departure as did I. Jay Leno, Carson’s designated successor, had a lot of fans and was getting a lot of hype. Then as now, popular culture tilted young, and Johnny was not young. I expected older people to lament but accept his passing from the late-night scene, much as they lamented but accepted their own increasing marginalization and eventual death. Most people my age—I was 33 then—probably were readier than was I for a changing of the guard. Those who were 20-something and younger probably wouldn’t much care one way or the other. Maybe they were watching that hip Arsenio Hall on the upstart Fox network.

Well, sure enough, a couple of youngsters I questioned at the malls shrugged about Carson but praised Hall. (Interestingly, one 23-year-old added, “But Letterman’s the man.”) Most of Johnny’s biggest fans shared his age bracket. Several senior citizens told me it had been years since they’d stayed up until 11:30 pm—meaning that while they wished Carson well in retirement, they'd have no loss to lament. My favorite respondents were a 22-year-old guy named Mike Jacobson, who bucked his generational norm by asserting, “Jay Leno will never be a Johnny Carson,” and 50-something Suenell Williams, who swooned, “I catch Johnny two or three times a week. I love him. I’ll miss him.”

Overall, the local mood was captured by the next morning's headline: “Savannahians Have Mixed Feelings on Carson’s Departure.” My lead sentence was “Johnny, maybe we just knew ye for too long.”

I of course have been thinking of all this as David Letterman has signed off this week after an even longer run—33 years—on late-night TV. There are so many parallels and interconnections, given that Carson had been Letterman’s mentor and was Carson’s personal choice as successor. Although Letterman was—is—the decidedly edgier of the two comedians, they shared a certain comic sensibility. They even seemed to mirror each other personally in key ways. As was Carson, Letterman is intensely private and is known not to be particularly cuddly off the set. There’s evidence that both men have treated the women in their life badly, although Carson wasn’t forced by an extortion plot to come clean on his behavior.

Also, as I had Carson, I loved Letterman the Host. The biggest knock on him, though more in his earlier years, was that he could be mean to his guests. But he always was harder on himself than he was on anyone else, and often hysterically so. In his unpredictability and his determination to follow his own whims—whether laconically taking fast-food orders from perplexed motorists or dropping objects off tall buildings just to gauge their splat—he really did redefine late-night comedy.

Again, I won’t pretend that I watched Letterman all that often. But when I did, I quickly was sucked in. Even when I didn’t quite get what he was trying to do, or when it just wasn’t working. Like Carson, Letterman reveled in his work. He aimed to please, both himself and the viewer, possibly in part because the rest of his life was a mixed emotional bag. There, too, were echoes of Carson.

Lynn and I actually caught a Late Show taping at the famed Ed Sullivan Theatre many years ago. Waiting on line outside with all the other happy fans on that February afternoon was a kind of New York dream. The show itself was an unmemorable one, but we didn’t care. We’d seen Dave in his natural habitat! Afterward we souvenir-shopped next door and had our photo taken with the Bangladeshi guys who’s been featured in several of Letterman’s on-camera gallivants through the neighborhood. It was winter, but the sun was shining. I’ll never forget it.

So, I felt I had to watch Letterman’s final show in real time, even though I knew it would be available—immediately afterward and in perpetuity—on any number of platforms, to use a word that didn’t exist in that meaning in 1992. If you care at all about Dave’s exit, you either watched it yourself, or read a review of it, or perhaps checked out the final, all-star top 10 list on YouTube. It certainly wasn’t the funniest Late Show ever, but to me it was kind of perfect.

Most of the jokes were at Dave’s own expense, and most of the sentiment was deflected onto his sidekicks and staff, of whom he was sincerely and movingly appreciative. Highlight reels captured some of his best bits over the years. He closed it all out with a dizzying, rapid-fire flash of Scenes From a Career as Foo Fighters—the band that had cancelled a South American tour to be his first post-heart surgery musical guests in 2000—played their deeply affecting song “Everlong.” Among its lyrics are these words: “And I wonder/If anything could ever feel this real forever/If anything could ever be this good again.”

I wonder that, too. Much as I did 23 years ago. Except that this week’s late-night departure has the added resonance, for me, of the final line in my long-ago newspaper story.

“I hate to see him go,” silver-haired Herbert Smith told the much-younger me, “because it means I’m getting old.”