Television: Can’t live with it, Can’t live without it. News and political commentary. The weather. Special events/celebrations, i.e. Olympics and Oscars and the like. Inane boring comedies focusing on bodily functions. The highlight might be the shows that make your own sorry life look good—you know the ones about hoarders, dumpster divers, cockroach stalkers….

There is good news however. The “Stories” are still around. My stories, watched every afternoon in a little cinder block house on the edge of Lake Conway, near McCoy AFB, Pinecastle, Florida.  My belly was growing large and my mind was lazing about with Chris and Nancy and the gang on As the World Turns. I think there was a Lisa and maybe a Don and one was a doctor and somebody on the show had a baby and once in awhile there was a bad accident but truthfully it’s all a little hazy. Kids were born, I went back to work and my favorite soap/story had to be abandoned.

As life went on Archie Bunker and Meathead visited and Mary Tyler Moore tossed her hat in the Minneapolis air where I’d worked just a few years before. Of course there were others keeping me company on those long ago evenings but enough about that time. Here, tonight, Matthew’s car must once again crash, he will be alone, no one to help, thankfully he will die instantly, but quite a haunting end nevertheless as blood pours from this mouth and his eyes stare into space.

 You see I have been on a Downton Abbey spree. Because I missed several episodes over the past three seasons I have been forced to watch all 24 plus shows these last weeks.

Oh sure, there are other fairly gripping tales such as The Good Wife, Call the Midwife, The Killing, and both NCISs. They are all real stories with intriguingly flawed characters with whom I have bonded. Still, they are just not Downton Abbey—the castle, the class, the clothes, the loves, the sorrows, the heroes, the villains.

Speaking of Downton Abbey and the last episode of season three. I can’t bear it. Seriously. Everyone was finally happy. The Irish son-in-law adjusting to life on an English estate, Matthew and Mary with the new baby, downstairs John and Anna are finally free of troubles and so on and so on. But now, Matthew must die. Wish I had a bottle of wine. Wish I could bring him back to life. Maybe Dan Stevens won’t get any jobs… maybe he’ll have to return from the dead; maybe Mary just dreamed the crash. Maybe I’ll put this off another night.