The morning began innocently routine enough. i did my breakfast, cat chores, made the coffee, did a stretch with a promise to do a complete routine before the day was over, sat down to the #$^^&&*)(^!!!#$%X computer. Innocence, routine, all sensible things gone.

The email said one of my “plugins” — That should have been my first hint. i don’t see a damn thing to plug in on this modem — would be automatically renewed. So, good, old fashioned me went to the website to update my Visa card that had been scammed and was changed, then shredded, all things i never used to consider. The site asked me to log in, like it was a speak easy. Uh Oh. It asked me for my user name. i typed in my email address. It told me my user name could not be my email address. i logged into my password saver doohickey. No such animal there.

So, i said to myself, my dear bride meticulously keeps a printed copy of all of our logins and passwords, which i have purloined and have ready to update in that pile, which was once my “action” pile, in the closet i put there when i cleaned the office two weeks before in preparation for the cleaning ladies to clean (here we go again).

i am now going through that “action” pile. The passwords, etc. are somewhere there. i vowed to spend my day getting all of it done, gone, up to date. i began. And what should fall out first. The photos below. They were in Kodak yellow 6 x 3 3/4 inch folder. Two had been torn out along the perforated lines at the top.

The other three are of my younger brother and best friend Joe on his third birthday several years ago, Castle Heights Avenue, Lebanon, Tennessee, 1952. i do not recognize the younger child with him in one of the photos where Joe is wearing his cowboy hat (of course). By the by, that tree that is beginning to bloom in the background was one of the three peach trees we had on the southern edge of our yard. They had very little yield and the peaches we did get weren’t very good so those trees left us somewhere in the mid-’50s. And that wagon was the first Utility Vehicle par excellence.

i intend to keep on chooglin’ with the “action” items. It needs to be done. But it will be less odorous now, because with each action and the old man mandated stretch in between. i will chuckle. No, it won’t be a chuckle. These will be an old man giggling…and wishing for the good ole days.