Growing up with Letterman kept family in stitches, and ice cream

This week David Letterman signs off from late-night television after 33 years. I’m 32 years old, so all I have known is Letterman in late-night. It was the best way to grow up.

I remember spending nights with my Grandpa Hlavaty in the late ’80s and early ’90s. We would share a pint of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla and watch Johnny Carson.

Grandpa would laugh heartily, and I’d laugh when I actually got the joke or when Carson put on a funny hat and accent.

As our ice cream-induced sugar high kicked in, Letterman’s “Late Night” circus began.

Once Letterman started, those Grandpa’s hearty chuckles turned into the kind of howls that he probably hadn’t made since he was a young sailor telling dirty jokes on a battleship. The gray bear of a man lit up. And Letterman was a hero to me.

My Dave mania continued when I got a television in my own room at home at the age of seven. When Letterman made the jump to CBS, I was all in.

I loved him because he was awkward, yet poised. He was nonchalant in his coolness. A lick of the fingers and one tug of his tie made even the worst joke palatable. He seemed like a misfit who got lucky.

I wrote my own Top Ten lists pertaining to school events and teen drama: “Top Ten reasons why Coach Ford wears those tiny maroon shorts,” etc. No one read those but me.

For about three years, I kept a log of every Letterman intro. You know how announcer Alan Kalter would announce the guests and the bands? I kept a log of every honorific given to Letterman, be it “1987 Lizard County Beauty Queen runner-up” or “Worldrecord holder for longest time spent noodling.” I still have those notebooks somewhere.

At one point I wrote a letter every week or so to Letterman’s people, begging him to come to Houston for a week of shows. He never came, of course. My hope was that he would come to town, come to my school, and make me the coolest kid on the planet for a week. I would be his Ed McMahon in Texas.

For a while, my best friend Chad and I had to coordinate our wardrobes to make sure we didn’t wear our matching “Late

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The late-night host tucked me into bed every night