I’m going to wait as long as I can to tell our good editor Ms. Andrea Lovejoy goodbye. Next week will do.

But some goodbyes take a while, so I thought I’d better start a week ahead just in case I get carried away. I can do that, you know.

In times like these - when somebody decides it’s time to check life out on the other side of nine-to-five - you can’t help but get a little nostalgic.

Getting nostalgic never has been a problem anyway.

I was just thinking what life would be like if I had never started spending my Saturday mornings with you. True, I wouldn’t have to strain my brain every Wednesday night to come up with something that you’d find exhilarating, funny, nostalgic, thought-provoking, crazy or silly on Saturday mornings. I’m sure I’d get to go to bed a little earlier on Wednesdays, and I know that Thursday mornings would be less hectic. Sometimes I have to do one last read-through of the week’s column between classes as kids mosey into the room asking questions that will just have to wait.

Inspiration never has been all that kind to me, not until a deadline stares me down like a gunfighter daring me to reach for my holster.

But I’m not thinking so much about me this week. I’m thinking about you. Just think of what you’d lose if you couldn’t open up LaGrange Daily News and find my still youthful-looking picture accompanied by a story that will sometimes make you call your husband or wife out on the porch to say, “You gotta read this.” (I can hope, can’t I!)

Or in the case of Co-cola Mike,

“Co-cola, better come here. Your Texas friend wrote you up again” (which I’m doing now because Co-cola and his family are in Gatlinburg having a good old time, and I’m not too happy about it.)

And the legend of his son Bathtub Stevie would not have been a legend at all.

And the amazing blonde who cooks my supper every night wouldn’t have been amazing either. It would have been a downright shame had you not gotten to meet the luckiest woman in the world.

Without the LDN, I never would be able to whip those boys down at the Y in dozens of games of basketball games the way I do. Playing the games on the hardwood often leave me beaten down and mad; but by the time my fingers finish relating the story here, I always fare better than I thought. This really is my story, and I’ll stick to it until somebody drags me off hollering and screaming.

You wouldn’t have met Grandma, either, and enjoyed sitting with me and her around her table eating cornbread and buttermilk and talking about the simplicities of life. You would never have smelled those hot biscuits and coffee and bacon in the mornings, either. Ah, through the years we shared many a breakfast fit for a king. Because of this place, you know now that that king was me.

You never would have heard the booming, raspy voice of Preacher Miller preaching a powerful sermon that left you and me and everybody within a block of the Murphy Street Church of Christ trembling in their boots. That voice would have faded out back in 1989 when he closed the Book for the final time. But the Book never really closes, especially when you’re liable to read his story on any cool, crisp Saturday morning.

My grandson Little Dewey would still be the light of my life, but you wouldn’t be able to read all of those “Dear Dewey” letters that takes that light from a Georgia heart and shines it like the stunning reflection of a full moon.

And Pretty Eyes would still have pretty eyes, but you wouldn’t have seen the gleam in my own eye when I talked about her.

And speaking of gleams in the eye, you might not have realized how grand a place this Georgia-land is. She might have just been the place you live. But now - seeing it from a vantage point 800 miles and often 30 years away - you see the aura of tall pines, red clay, and pleasing Southern accents that roll off the tongue as smoothly as the rolling Chattahoochee.

All of that because of the 700 words a week on an inside page of a little Southern newspaper sitting on thousands of front porches in a town not far from the Alabama line.

We call her LaGrange.

I still call her home.

I guess I’m one of the few lucky ones. I get to write home every Saturday morning.

Contact Steve Bowen at steven.bowen@redoakisd.org.