Touched is what I am by the number of people who thought I had vanished from this place. And especially by the number who were sorry.

I wasn’t far, having only moved laterally to go on a different stage, playing a different part: the role of Gail Collins in her dialogs with David Brooks elsewhere in Opinionator while she took a well-deserved three weeks away from that grind of two fine and hefty columns a week. A gig that has been known to crumple strong men and women.

Quite a number of Cavett-ites found me there, but for those who did not and succumbed to melancholy at my possible demise, I recommend your excavating those three columns. Even if it’s only for my granting the hinted request by David Brooks — Marx Bros. fanatic extraordinaire — to include a bit of Groucho each time.

If a touch of the strain of jangled nerves should shine through here this time, it has to do with finally and at longest last pulling out of the tunnel of— O, horrid, horrid term! — moving.

A soul-killing ordeal at best, as you may sadly have found.

But in New York City!? Fuggetaboutit!

When that moment comes and you look around your place and realize that all you see and can’t see has to be gotten to another place — much, but not all of it, by way of a temporary place — while tinkering, labor and major repairs are done on the “new” place, and for months beyond the promised dates, at that moment of contemplating the move … think again.

Not about ending your life. Those thoughts will come later. When stuff begins to break, disappear, go to the wrong places; when friends and acquaintances are lost because mail and phones are screwed up and significant messages, letters and invites go astray; when little things happen as when a beautiful 100- year-old quarter-sawn oak antique cabinet marked “SAVE!” is removed from its wall by the efficient method of chopping it to splinters; when newly installed plumbing and electronics look nice but don’t work … I could go on, but it’s too difficult.

The overall worst aspect of this anxiety-dream-come-true of moving is that things you thought you’d see again soon, and that are vitally needed, are … somewhere. The old place? The temporary place? The new place?

At triply long last, we are finally “in.” But it’s not yet totally over. For an only child like me it’s a chance to get the feeling of a large family. At any given time, like this one for instance, there can be from three to seven workmen — skilled and pleasant enough — each at his specialty. Finishing up loose ends, I think it’s called. Many ends. Much looseness.

(There’s also a health hazard involved in moving. You wake up in the new place at night in pitch dark and, without benefit of illumination, make a sharp right, the direction to the bathroom in the last place you lived, smacking into a wall with a whack that Buster Keaton would be challenged to duplicate. This makes you feel very stupid. And it’s no more fun the second and third times.)

Years ago, two young, struggling actor friends of mine — living separately — decided to combine forces and finances by finding another apartment, one they could share. At moving time, both were on tour and left instructions to remove all the furniture from the furnished, bigger apartment they were moving to, put it in storage for the landlord, and move their combined stuff in.

They came home to a surprise.

The move had been tough on them financially, but they were happy to find everything in the new apartment as planned. Less so, to find a thing I can only hope you will believe. All the furnished apartment furniture had indeed been removed … and hauled across town and evenly distributed between their two former apartments.

The cause had something to do with a dearth of I.Q. points. The alleged movers — whose truck bore a name like “Couple O’ Nice Fellas and Their Big Van” — had moved on without a trace; perhaps to a less challenging profession, intellectually.

My friends’ combined unemployment insurance that week, and I think a bit of mine, almost covered the expense of undoing the dumbness.

I’d go on with this but the subject matter is hurting, and also it’s a little noisy here just now.

I’ll just add this: a nattering TV in the background just emitted the sounds of a supporter, apparently, of a particular woman in the news these days, announcing loudly to the world, “There’ll never be another Liz Cheney!”

For that, I shall take a welcome pause from all this and offer a silent prayer of gratitude.