Well, this is it. It’s 9 p.m. and I have to come up with a final column. That’s really hard for a comic writer who used to be a serious guy to say. But, as you can see, things have changed for all of us. There seems to be a boxcar passing by I can grab a space on top of. I did exactly that when I was young.

My readers, I’m told, are dying off faster, and She with them. So I’ve been called home to L.A. by my two daughters, and I’ve accepted. They’ve gotten me a space, and I’ve put my castle on the Kennebec on the table.

You already know that I started in the newspaper game as a delivery boy with the St. Louis Globe Democrat in the back of a red wagon that I dragged around a neighborhood I didn’t know. I shouted “MORNNNNNING GLOOOBE” selling papers the night Roosevelt died. Then I went back to the newsstand in front of the Cardinal Restaurant at 10 a.m. A guy was inside the Cardinal lying between three chairs and couldn’t get up. I was told by someone standing by the front door that he used be a star reporter for the Post Dispatch but when the word came that his son had gone down somewhere in the Pacific, he gave up the game and kissed Mother Scotch, and that was that.

I later graduated to late-night copy boy on the Globe Democrat, where I brought “cough medicine” to reporters who didn’t have a cough.

After that, every day after school at 3:30 I rode on the back of the delivery truck of the St. Louis Star Times, throwing the late afternoon issue on to wet lawns and to folks sitting on their front stoops. That’s how it was in the newspaper game in those days.

During the Korean “difficulty,” I wrote letters home for guys who couldn’t spell “mother” to girlfriends in Texas telling them to wait for them while they had a local Japanese laundry girlfriend washing their underwear. I got 50 cents a letter and got pretty good at lying to girlfriends in San Antonio.

After that, my writing got better as I grew up, as you can see. I got better by reading the top columnists like Mike Royko in the Chicago papers, and in the libraries in all the big cities, and looking up columns in the papers and magazines people left on park benches. I read Art Buchwald in the Washington Post and my favorite teacher, Jimmy Breslin, who wrote in the New York Daily News Sunday paper, which I stole from front porches in the Bronx.

Yes, I finally got to write Wednesday pieces for the Los Angeles Times on the political page that President Reagan read every day. Then one day, Maureen Murphy called me and asked if I would like a permanent column at $230 bucks a week. She who was born with money got tears on both sides of her nose, held my hand and said “Sweetie, why don’t we go back to my little town in Maine and you be the real writer you are?” It took me two weeks to tell Maureen I was going to Maine. Yes, two weeks. So I landed, for love of a Maine Catholic girl, and Bob Moorehead read my L.A. columns and gave me a column here.

So most of this you know. Most of the friends I met when I got off the train with She are dead, and I have no desire to be covered with snow. So I’m looking for a boxcar to jump on and will leave you all standing and waving. I promised a last piece so they could send me a check. It’s always been that way for old Irish writers. So long friends, you know who you are.

So long, gang.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.