“Okay, David.”

Really, Cokie? I give you “it’s always a pleasure” and all you can exhume from your mountains of journalistic wisdom is “Okay, David”? 

Monday, 3:30 AM. David Greene had tripped on the wire-snarled toy left carelessly at the foot of the bed and now sat fuming on the toilet seat examining a broken toenail. He, who wakes up at 3:30 every morning to announce the news to a waking nation. He, who began interning at NPR after his freshman year. He, who had never wanted anything but this. He’d given up plenty to have this shot at Morning Edition. Including the non-wall-side of the bed in a complex negotiation of marital logistics. Was it so much to ask to keep that wirey toy that reminded him of a pediatrician’s waiting room from creating an impossible situation between his mattressed prison and the bathroom?

And on a Monday. The day Cokie Roberts checked in from Capitol Hill and reminded him in her sign-off that he was a Johnny-Come-Lately, a bear in the woods, an F.N.G.

Cokie, it seemed, made it her weekly mission to broadcast to the nation that he was no Steve Inskeep.

Meanwhile, Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne “Cokie” Roberts née Boggs walked on her treadmill flipping through yesterday’s Parade magazine. The by-line of a young reporter lodged itself in a drawer in her brain reserved for the names of writers who herald the death of journalism. You call this a nut graph? I know it’s just Parade but Christ, she thought, why can’t these kids be more like Greene? With a promise to herself to be running again by Thursday, she hopped off the treadmill and hummed her way to the shower. Monday was her favorite day of the week.