I used to read Parade: that bright, shiny, silly advertisement stuffed into the Sunday section of newspapers like The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun. Now, it’s been a very long time since I’ve had a subscription to either paper, and these days, I read newspapers through the wonders of “teh internets.” I think the last time I actually held a copy of Parade was the weekend after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, when it ran a front-page story and never actually mentioned her death.

As a teenager, especially, I always enjoyed the “In Step With…” by James Brady. As I’m older, and hopefully wiser, I realize these were little more than fluff interviews with some big-name celebrity who needed to do some promoting: certainly, once the relevant biographical details were released, there wasn’t room for much more than “what’s your favorite color?” and “how cool is it to work with [other celebrity]?”

Anyway, so James Brady died recently. He was eighty, and the brief CNN article about his death reveals he was a Korean War veteran who wrote a book called “The Coldest War.” I know that book! I haven’t read it, but we have copies of it at the Bookstore and it seems to sell reasonably well (especially for a book nearly two decades old). I’m having a hard time getting my head wrapped around the notion that Parade‘s celebrity interviewer wrote a war memoir.

I also think it’s kind of sad that I can think of three paragraphs to write about James Brady’s death, and only one or two about John Updike. Then again, Brady, even in such a minor way, was a far more significant part of my life than Updike has been. (And, also, I was really busy yesterday).