A sports columnist, a generation before mine, imagined what it would be like if he suddenly died.

“The first day,” said Joe Falls, long a Detroit fixture, “everyone would be sad. ‘Ain’t it awful about old Joe,’ they would say.

“The second day they would sigh and shake their heads and say, ‘You know, I sure miss old Joe’.”

“On the third day they would put down the paper and say, ‘You know, this new guy’s not too bad.”

In my case, there is no new guy, not even a paper. But there is a new world and I will need a few more days to decide if it is not too bad.