The signs of carnage were everywhere, I thought.  Even television was changing.  I loved the new because I was young, but I liked balance, too.  I liked old things, touchstones.  Some of them, anyway.  I didn't care for Lawrence Welk, of course, and did not weep when it was gone, but I did not like "The Partridge Family" at all, either.  There were things that I did grow up with that were disappearing, things I had watched with my mother and father, shows and characters that had entered my forming psyche permanently.  the Jackie Gleason and the Red Skeleton shows were cancelled.  Gone.  There would be no more "Good night and gawd bless," no more "How sweeeeet it is!"  Ed Sullivan was cancelled, too, a whole lifetime of Sunday nights.  And so were "The Beverly Hillbillies."  

And NFL football was going to be on Monday Nights!

There were new shows, hip shows and socially conscious shows about lawyers and psychiatrists, and there was "Mary Tyler Moore" and "All in the Family."  

And there was Nixon.  

Everywhere you turned, there was revolution.  

My mother and father decided to get divorced.  They had been married for twenty years, but things had been very bad.  I didn't know how to feel.  There would be no more fighting.  There would be no more family, either.  My father was leaving and my mother was getting the house.  I felt numb the way you do when you get hit hard by something, waiting to see how badly you are hurt.  

I got a job at a pizza place that sold square pieces of pizza by the piece.   I liked working there.  It was something to do.