That’s what my son called it when he phoned me to ask: “How you doin’ against the ‘vid?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him — three times — what he said: “Are you saying ‘vid’? What the hell is a ‘vid’?” Something in the corner of my mind hinted that it might be a term having to do with gambling, but I hadn’t placed any bets lately.

I freely confess that I’m an idiot, but I’m not stupid. My bike has flashing lights fore and aft, I wear a red helmet and sunglasses, and I’m dressed in either orange, yellow, or fluorescent green.

Now, I don’t want to imply that any cyclist on the road is an idiot like me.

While other birds are beautiful in some gaudy, outlandish way — like cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, or even robins — the tiny wren’s beauty lies in its simple, classical, dappled brown look, like a tiny refined Englishman in a tweed suit.

Its song, however, is anything but simple. During mating season, the male will stake out his territory atop a likely birdhouse and fill the air with trills and whistles whose complexity would make any classical composer envious.

I started, of course, by saying goodbye to colleagues — teachers, secretaries, custodians, counselors, and even a few administrators — but then I bid farewell to the places and things I would miss.

One of them was the coaches’ locker room, where I had spent countless hours before school, after school, and on weekends.

Still, if you’re a Sun City Illinoisan who was looking forward to getting reacquainted with those long-awaited love-bugs, this year of the dragon has been a bit of a drag, because there hasn’t been a cicada in sight in our part of the world.

And I guess that should come as no surprise, because they weren’t here in Sun City 17 years ago, either.

OK, that might not be the best way to begin this. Let me start again.

Almost every Saturday and Tuesday morning, I go to the Woodstock farmer’s market, where besides finding the best produce and caramel corn, I listen to some of the best free music anywhere on this planet or any other.

But as the 18th Century Scottish poet Robert Burns famously wrote: “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

Well, that’s not exactly how he said it. In the words of his place and time, it was: “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!”

And so, as I say, tomorrow Gail and I would be toasting our long marriage, had things not “gang agley”.

Quirky? Twisted? Wonky?

Nope. Let’s go with askew. I can live with askew.

So you probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that I’m planting my Planet Kerth garden now, and this year I’ve decided not to do it the way most people on Planet Earth do it, but the way they do it on Planet Mars.

Well, they don’t do it that way on Mars yet, because right now Mars is pretty much totally uninhabited and un-gardened.

That’s because their favorite resting spot, the old purple cherry plum tree in my yard, is gone. It blew down on one of those blustery days in late April, just before the hummers got back in town.

That tree was my favorite of all the trees in my yard.

That’s because the long-awaited 17-year cicadas are clearing their throats underground just beneath the trees right now, and soon the branches above will ring with their robust songs. And every other time in my life that they’ve come to visit—four times in total before this time — they somehow found a way into my mouth.

My first encounter with the gigantic periodic bugs was in 1956, when I was eight years old.

Mom earned a high school diploma from Leyden High School, but Dad left school at 14 to get a job to help support his family during the Great Depression. Had it not been for such hard economic times, he would have earned his high school diploma, too.

That’s because our government a century ago felt that education was important enough to guarantee that young people have the right to be educated through high school, funded by taxpayers.

And I thought, “Acme Barricades? Wile E. Coyote must be building this house.” Because if you’re a kid like me who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, Acme could mean only one thing: the Acme Catalog from which Coyote ordered every gadget imaginable to outwit Roadrunner — gadgets that failed spectacularly every time.

I know that’s not the kind of confession you expect to hear every day, but there it is:

Today, I lost a ham.

“How does someone lose a ham?” my friend Anne asked when I told her.

“Well, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be able to un-lose it,” I said, so I tried to recreate the day’s stunning mystery as well as I could.

I went to the grocery store to pick up a few staples I was running low on — bananas, sour cream, grapes, juice, chips — and when I passed through the meat section a nice ham caught my eye.

“What was the cause of the Civil War?” she was asked.

And rather than giving the answer that any ten-year-old American could give, she opted instead for nuance.

The Civil War was fought over “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” she said.

Of course, Haley was right in a technical sense, because embracing or abolishing slavery was all about “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.”

“Probably four or five years,” I said. “I refill it in case I get thirsty through the night.”

She was horrified and started talking about microplastics, forever chemicals and any number of other unpleasant thoughts.

“Then I probably shouldn’t tell you about the plastic water bottle in my car that’s been there for the last five or six hot summers,” I said.

But for me, it’s cookies.

To be specific, it’s the scent of baking cookies, and the clatter of baking pans from the next room.

The first was the memory of a powerful passage from a novel by Elie Wiesel, in which a man is waiting to execute a political prisoner who has been sentenced to die at sunset. He says you know night has arrived when you’re gazing out a window in the evening and you suddenly realize that you’re looking at your reflection in the darkening glass instead of the landscape outside.

It would be a stretch to call me a luddite, but it’s fair to say I’m luddite-adjacent.

Yes, I carry my cell phone wherever I go, but I tell myself it’s purely for safety reasons.

And when a boy named Jim said his hero was Jean-Claude Van Damme, I asked him why.

He talked about all the characters the actor played, and how much he liked those characters.

It’s like that with me whenever I hear the name of Chicago Bears middle linebacker Dick Butkus — “the most feared tackler of all time” according to the NFL Network — who passed away two weeks ago on October 5.