On November 13, it was Paris.

Today it was San Bernardino, California.

The past few years, I have spent more time in Paris — where 129 were killed in terror attacks on November 13 — than in California. And we had stayed, the week before, in Paris, on the very street where people were killed while eating dinner.

But I worked in downtown San Bernardino for most of my adult life, and that is the city where 14 people were killed today.

In both cases, the slaughters seem only one remove or so from my own egocentric existence, and I can easily envision the places where people were killed and sense the distress among those who live in those two cities. And it’s all weird.

It is not yet clear what were the motives for the San Bernardino shootings, which happened at the Inland Regional Center, which provides services for people with disabilities.

The address is on Waterman Avenue, which is one of the main north-south streets in San Bernardino.

Back in the 1970s, when the sports staff at the San Bernardino Sun would go to lift a glass or two after the night shift, we would drive down Waterman — and right past where the Regional Center is — to Bobby Magees, a restaurant/disco long since gone.

I suspect that we will have some sort of connection with someone who was at the crime scene today; San Bernardino is not that big a town, even if the population seems to have turned over fairly intensely over the past 10 years.

I worked there from 1976 to 2008, part of a team that chronicled the city’s sports events, and I can still see in my mind’s eye nearly every place indicated on maps of today’s events.

I have been on the golf course, across the street from the offices where 14 were killed, where helicopters landed to take away the wounded.

The shooting site also is about a mile north of the Hospitality Lane area, which has become one of the prime areas of economic activity in a city otherwise struggling to produce jobs. I have shopped or had a meal or a drink in that area hundreds of times.

Again, this sense of “this is just crazy” is the first reaction. Again, we mourn for those who lost their lives and, in our own little world, are thankful those close to us were not on the scene — though many have been traumatized, I am sure.

Even the “secondary” sites of today’s violence, on Center Street in the neighboring city of Redlands and, apparently, on San Bernardino Avenue … I have been there, too.

San Bernardino was a city I cared about and had deep interest in, through 2008.

Since then, the bonds have weakened. The newspaper I worked with hardly exists anymore. Many of those I knew who lived in the city moved to neighboring communities as San Bernardino, once proud of its 1976 designation as an All-America City, slid into bankruptcy.

But the distance between me and the city is not so great as to dissolve the memories of all the people there. San Bernardino is not so far removed I can set aside, emotionally, what happened there — as we often do in cases of senseless violence.

San Bernardino has had a hard time, up to and including the common misspelling of the name. San B-e-r-n-a-r-d-i-n-o.

But until today it often was known as the home of the first McDonald’s burger joint and a place where future president Lyndon Johnson once ran an elevator, the home of Gene Hackman and Twyla Tharp and a former stop on Route 66.

Now, when people think about San Bernardino … it probably will be remembered first — and for years to come — as the place where a disturbed husband and wife killed 14 people at a facility dedicated to helping people.