For years, we watched NBC 6:30 news before dinner. Those were the good old days, the George H.W. Bush days, the Barack Obama days.

We’d have nuts and cheese, a sip of wine, and then sit down to dinner at seven or eight, like those fashionable people in L.A. who would invite us outliers to dinner because I had just started writing for the Los Angeles Times. Long ago and far away.

Back in the early days, the Walter Cronkite, Edward Murrow days, we were too young and busy to watch the evening news. The world just turned round and round, and we let it turn. Sometimes we didn’t even watch the news at all. Those were happy days.

Occasionally, at a party or in the street, someone would tell us about Watergate or the Manson Family.

Now we’re old — not falling down and grabbing something to hold onto old — just a few pills in a plastic box that read MON. TUES. WED., etc. That kind of old.

We were still in the nuts and cheese stage when the first news about something weird came out of China, about bad pork that was making people sick. Remember that?

I remember, as I was munching cashews and sipping my Stella, She, who was doing the cooking then, asked me why we were importing any pork from China at all.

Indeed. What was happening in Iowa that made them stop raising pigs? Wasn’t Iowa famous for pigs?

Now we’re old — not going to the bathroom six times a night old — just old enough to worry about dying needlessly of a virus.

We’ve started eating dinner early, about 6:30, so we would have enough evening to have Jimmy Kimmel distract us from the horrible news.

Which brings me down to this serious question: What do we watch while we eat dinner now?

Lester Holt appears: “24,582 people in Los Angeles are dead of COVID-related illness,” he might say.

Or, “The entire northern half of California is on fire again, and Paradise is threatened.”

Remember Paradise, California, that tiny town that was entirely wiped out there years ago? Lester is now telling us that a major blaze is only 10 miles from the ill-named Paradise. Ten miles.

We switch to the local news we had taped earlier, to embrace the calm of the Pine Tree State.

Egad! Rob Caldwell is talking about the browntail caterpillar attack.

Pat Callaghan is speaking of a new breed of killer tick, and Keith Carson is saying we’re going to get six more weeks of rain, and my basement is already flooded.

I imagine you’re now saying, “Why don’t She and He just light the candles, have a glass of wine and TALK TO EACH OTHER?”

Now listen. She and I are reasonably well educated old people who have been talking to each other since 1959.

We live and work at home. We see each other 17 hours a day.

Since this darkness fell, we’ve grown closer.

We do nothing but talk to each other.

We love talking to each other and never run out of topics.

Wait. It’s almost time for the news. There’s Lester now. Oh no! What did he say? Pass the macaroni salad.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

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