There's an odd rumor going around that this is my last column in the Star Tribune. I don't know how it got started, but it's wrong.

Tomorrow is my last column.

This means I have the opportunity to do a proper Minnesota Goodbye, the Winter Version.

We are not a people known for our hasty exits. It begins when Dad or Hank or Harvey slaps his thighs with both hands and says, "Welp," which is a signal that the disengagement process has begun.

So, today's column will be the equivalent of everyone getting their coats and wraps and gloves and moving to the front door, where they are gifted with leftovers in containers they can return "when it's convenient, no rush, really." In Monday's column, we'll move toward the car, which the welp-initiator started up 10 minutes earlier so it'd be warm.

Some questions you might have:

Q: What will go in this space?

A: I don't know. For the short term, probably a Spirit Halloween store.

Q: Are you out of ideas?

A: Not at all! The other day I realized that ever since I started writing columns in the Minnesota Daily in 1978, I've never addressed the fact that bacon packages are designed to show off the meaty part and hide the fat. We know that, and yet, when we pull back that flap and see the fat, we feel like we somehow got tricked.

Q: Let me rephrase that: Are you out of good ideas?

A: That's a subjective matter. Humor is subjective, after all. And perishable. Like bacon. I'd like to think there's been some empirically proven humorous moments in the 1,000-plus pieces I've penned for this paper.

Q: Any thoughts having such a long career in newspapers?

A: Too many. But if I trotted out the cliched recitation of how the industry has changed, how once newsrooms were loud, chaotic places alive with curses and clattering manual typewriters, with gruff-but-lovable editors barking orders to a room blue with cigarette smoke — well, I would deserve to be put out to pasture for obvious, banal nostalgia.

Let's just put it this way: Nearly everything has changed, but there is still "Garfield" every day. I have no explanation for that. Did you know he hates Mondays? I have no idea why. They are indistinguishable from every other iteration of his indolent existence.

Q: So, it's Arizona sunbird/golf life now?

A: No! My employee badge still works on the security doors. I'll be writing about urban design and architecture.

When I first started here in 1997, I bought a batch of pencils at a store downtown, back when there was such a thing as stores downtown. Never got around to sharpening them.

I've had them in a mug on every desk I've occupied, and over the years decided that when it was time to go, I would hand them out to friends and interns and new hires, saving the last for myself, which I would snap in half before I left for good, possibly to the strains of "Siegfried's Death" by Wagner.

Not there yet.

Q: What can you possibly say in Monday's last column?

A: Well, tune in and find out. If not, I thank anyone and everyone who read one of my columns in its 46-year run here and there. It's been fun. And I miss you already.