I’ve reached the age where my sister and I ARE the older generation in our family. She stuck me with “The Box” that has a lot of unsorted family pictures. Now I’m scanning them and sending her all the ones I can’t identify. If she doesn’t know either, no one else will ever know or care about those images. So I’m reluctantly deleting the remaining unknowns and tossing the original prints. I decided it’s OK to be sentimental, but probably less compelling to be sentimental about photos that could just as well be someone else’s family. Still, it’s hard.

I do NOT want to see a sewn-shut image of that.

When I was young, it was my father’s job on Sundays to get me bathed and dressed for church. He was a kind and gentle man, with a wicked sense of humor, but my fidgeting and total lack of an attention span would occasionally wear on him as he tried to get a squirming boy into a suit.

One morning, he paused and said he needed me to stay still and pay attention so I didn’t end up like my brother. Confused, I said that I didn’t have a brother. He agreed that I didn’t have a brother … any more. I, of course, fell into the trap and asked what had happened to my brother.

As he pulled on one of my socks, he casually explained that my brother just wouldn’t listen and wouldn’t sit still, so my father “yanked his arm off and beat him to death with the bloody stump.”

At that point, he had my full attention, and I’ll bet my fidgeting had completely stopped. I was dressed in record time, and off our family went to church, with a quiet little boy in the back seat silently contemplating the world that had just been revealed to him. I’m sure that my father was having a great laugh on the inside as we drove along.

All was well until the drive home, when I finally asked my parents in the front seat why they had never told me about my dead brother. My father’s shoulders began to hunch, and he slunk down in his seat as my mother’s gaze swung toward him. Still looking at him, she asked me softly what my father had told me.

It was a long, quiet ride home that day.

Perhaps no purchase/investment decision?

Virginia is very accommodating for citizens as lazy as I am. After I voted by mail for several elections during the Covid Days, they just sent me a form asking if I’d like a mail-in ballot for each future election. I jumped at it, and I receive my ballots like clockwork. It’s like shopping at Amazon - never even have to leave the house.