One last column. It is the sum of its parts. Or a part of its sums.

1. When I was 22 I never thought I’d live long enough to retire. Instead I figured I’d be lucky if I made it past 40, and 50 was probably the limit. I thought people in their 60s smelled funny and made weird noises.

And now here I am, the big 62. I smell funny and make weird noises. And I’m retired as of Saturday.

Please don’t ask me how it happened or why you should care, because I don’t know the answer to either.

The events leading up to this week took place when I wasn’t looking, and I’m glad they did and gladder still my 22-year-old self was wrong.

I would’ve hated to miss the last dozen years, and the last 40.

2. I was going to take this space to thank people, lots of people, because I have a lot of people to thank and a lot of people to whom I owe some measure of gratitude.

But I worried I’d leave somebody out or, worse, put somebody in I didn’t really want to, just to be nice.

Retiring is weird. To say thanks I might instead at some point write a letter to the new editor, Andrea Gutierrez, if I can figure out a way to list close to 30 some odd years’ worth of names.

That’s because you don’t do this sort of thing for long without meeting a lot of good people. It takes a village to be an editor, I believe. Or to keep an eye on one, for sure.

That said, you meet some stuffed shirts and nuts and whiners, and experts in everybody else’s business, and those seem to be multiplying (at least on social media), but then, I suspect there are a lot of folks who don’t like me either.

And that’s OK, that’s us humans for you. If we all got along and liked each other we wouldn’t need lawyers or bankers or cops or soldiers, etc. We could instead leave our money in the yard and go rake some up if we needed it, and if somebody decided they didn’t like the way I did something they could come over to talk to me about it rather than take me to court.

I wouldn’t have to worry about me shooting them, and I wouldn’t have to worry about them shooting me, or keying my pickup.

3. Sorry. I get sidetracked easily. Back to getting old.

The young lady replacing me, Andrea is 22, so I’ve got 40 years on her. That’s a lot of years, but it’s likely narrower from my perspective. We geezers and apprentice geezers see things from the rear view mirror after we’ve done gone past them.

Truth is, I can’t even remember how it was when I was 22, but recall I thought I knew everything and everything was black and white and the gray hadn’t yet crept in. But at least I’ve been down that road. And that’s the difference between us and them. Us older folks and the younger ones coming up.

The road the generation Andrea belongs to is traveling is one they haven’t been down before, and a decade down the road might as well be light years away. They don’t know how fast it happens, how fast they’re really going.

That’s important, somehow, because it seems we oldsters expect younger generations to be like carbon copies of us and know what we know and think like we think, and if they aren’t then something’s wrong with them. That’s horse hockey.

I won’t even pretend to know how they see us, other than we can seem kind of mildewed, and left them a mess of a world to clean up.

No wonder they’re looking for alternate routes.

So you can’t say their way is wrong, or they aren’t hard working, or they won’t make some of the same mistakes we did. Or you can say it, but it’s not fair. It’s their journey. We have to give them the keys and get out of their way. Especially since they’re going to be paying my Social Security.

4. This paper could die in another year or two if things don’t change. It’s only open now because of the determination of our ownership to be a community newspaper, despite scary-looking balance sheets.

More than 2,000 papers have closed up since 2005, and there are guestimates that as many as a third of all the newspapers that were in business then will be shuttered by 2025.

Shut down. Out of business. Those that are still open are struggling. We’re struggling.

The truth, as longtime co-worker Mark Swendra reminded me Tuesday, is that six years ago there were 22 employees working for the Bryan County News and our sister paper in Hinesville, the Coastal Courier. Today there’s just five.

That’s sad, especially when you realize there are a lot of folks who want to advertise in our paper, they want a paper to advertise in.

They just don’t want to call it advertising and they don’t want to pay us to get in the Bryan County News.

They just want us to sell you their product, whether it’s a service or an image or what, so they’ll pay a PR firm to try and turn it into editorial content. Sometimes it works.

And lest you think that’s a knock on PR firms, it isn’t.

I know good PR people who try to direct advertising our way because they want to see local independent journalism continue.

Without it, you get the social media community pages and internet news websites run by self-appointed, unethical ax grinders who frequently confuse news with opinion and their opinion with news, and violate most of the tenets of journalism for hits and likes.

And that’s being polite. 5.I had a brief instance of my perpetual teenager-dom where I thought I might take a selfie of my 62-year-old behind and put it in this paper somewhere just to see if anybody could find it.

My mugshot will do that trick. It looks about the same.

Thanks for reading. Go Gamecocks.

Jeff Whitten is the now-former editor of the Bryan County News. If you’re shedding a tear right now, it’s probably just allergies.