My wife asked to look through my smart phone to search for a photo we took on a recent vacation. “Do you ever delete any of these images?” she asked. “You have a lot of really weird stuff in here.”
“Don’t erase anything!” I told her.
The truth is that with my increasing age, I am becoming more forgetful, so I take pictures of almost everything. Mary Ellen and I agreed to go through my phone together and discard any unnecessary shots. She told me this would give me more memory, but she was referring to the phone, I am pretty sure.
“OK, Dick. Let’s begin with these first four. They are all pictures of your foot— your right foot — in the same position. Were you sending these to your podiatrist?”
“No, I must have snapped those by mistake. You can delete them. What’s next?”
“Well, here is a whole album full of photos of old to-do lists. Why are you saving those?”
“That’s in case I have the same things to do another day. I can just copy and paste. There should be an album full of different grocery lists in there, too.”
“Here’s an interesting one, Dick: it’s a picture of your computer keyboard. Is that so if you lose it, you can show the guy at Staples what order you want the letters in on your replacement keyboard? Oh, this is a good idea: it’s a photo of the list of all your passwords, which is handy if someone finds your phone and wants to share in our life savings. Here you have photos of a bunch of people I don’t recognize.”
“Mary Ellen, I took the pictures so I would remember them.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t recall, now. They’re probably either the folks I play pickleball with or new reporters at Channel 8.”
“But you still don’t know their names.”
“No, but now I will at least recognize them when I see them, and I will know for sure whether I am at work or the YMCA.”
“Dick, throughout the photos, there are pictures of an old man with thinning hair and a double chin. Who is he?”
“That’s probably my friend Luke at the nursing home.”
“I don’t think so, but nice try. These are the worst selfies I have ever seen. In some of them you tilt your head back to eliminate the extra chin, but then you look like you have the biggest nostrils in the world. And why is there a photo in here of your underwear?”
“Because that is the only brand I like. I want to be sure I always get the same kind.”
“Well, that explains the close-ups of a Heinz Ketchup bottle and Hellmann’s Mayonnaise jar. … Dick, as I go through your phone, I see lots of photos of an attractive redhead. Is something going on behind my back?”
“Very funny, Mary Ellen. I was standing right in front of you each time I took your picture.”
