As I've mentioned on this here podcast, we lost our home of 31 years and everything in it in the Pacific Palisades fire earlier this year.

And if you listen to the last episode of Wiser Than Me, in that episode, I warned that I might

be talking to you, dearest listener, about that fire and the loss that came with it a lot this

season. And, well, I'm a woman in my word. So here you go.

We had a rough plan of evacuation from that house.

The most important thing to get out was our photos.

And unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to put that plan into effect and all the photos were lost.

And I have to say, we had more than just a few photos.

In fact, we had Lord help us more than 90 big photo albums that were perfectly sorted and identified and organized by me. Every picture ever taken of our kids and also

crazy important stuff like our parents' baby pictures and the only pictures that existed of my

parents' sweating and a photo of my father-in-law playing high school football in a leather

helmet in 1927, and many, many, just thousands more, like tens of thousands more.

We were the repository of the family record, and it is definitely obsessive, but, God, it was so joyful. It was so perfect.

These photos gave me an enormous amount of joy. And there was one in particular that was just so good.

It was this gorgeous photo that could have been a Norman Rockwell painting of our son Charlie at about five in his

first baseball uniform sitting on his dad's knee hugging a huge baseball glove like a doll

baby.

And his dad, my Brad, who was Charlie's first baseball coach, was in the exact same Texas Rangers uniform hugging Tiny Charlie.

You just can't imagine the shit-eating grins on their faces. It was just heaven.

Another was a photo that Brad took of our son Henry sitting on my father's lap on the

Il San Luis in Paris, my father's beloved hometown, with an ice cream cone in his chocolate

covered four-year-old hand and more chocolate dripping down his smiling chin.

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