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For the two weeks my beautiful wife and I were in Mexico, things kept chugging along at home.
    We kept calling to make sure the kiddies and grandkiddies were okay. I called my father, but, as I found out later, he kept his phone turned off the whole time we were gone.
    “Why did you turn it off?” I asked him when I got back.
    “I didn’t want to use up the battery,” he explained.
    Besides being able to recharge the battery, I asked him, “But what if I was calling because of an emergency?”
    “Oh, I would have turned it on for that,” he said.
     The entire vacation, my wife’s cousin and her husband were always taking selfies with a selfie stick, and, since we were talking about phones, I made the mistake of telling him that.
    “I’d like a selfie stick,” he told me.
    “You would?”
    My father, who’s not a fan of technology or fads (he doesn’t tell Alexa to ‘stop,” he tells her to ‘shut up’), answered, “Yeah. That way, whenever they wanted to take a selfie, I could whack them with it.”
    While we were gone, my granddaughter’s goldfish died. It was buried in the backyard and she was understandably upset, but not for the reason you’d think.
    “I wanted to make sushi,” she tattled, “and mommy wouldn’t let me.”
     She must have been concerned that things might have changed while we were gone, because when nighttime came around she asked me, “Are you going to tuck me in?”
    “Of course,” I told her.
    Things were back to normal.
    When I was tucking her in I was feeling a bit sentimental, so I began singing “Ain’t No Ash Will Burn” by Della Mae for her. It’s a beautiful song. She stopped me immediately.
    “I don’t like that song,” she told me.
    “What do you mean you don’t like it? When you were a baby, I used to sing that song to you all the time.”
    “I didn’t like it then, either,” she said.