I found old photographs in the attic. I rifled through hundreds of old Polaroids. Most were infant pictures of me naked.

I was a fat baby. People were concerned about me as a newborn. “Have you seen Sue’s baby?” people would say. Then they would inflate their cheeks and do an imitation of the Pillsbury spokesperson.

My hair was the color of a carrot. My belly looked like a No. 9 bowling ball.

In one photo, I was taking a bath in the kitchen sink. My parents made no attempt to hide my butt from the camera. In fact, I found many pictures wherein my fundaments were actually the focal point.

My mother took these pictures.

I know this because my mother was obsessed with my butt. She was always showing these pictures to company.

“Can I refill your tea?” my mother would ask people. “Would you like to see a picture of my son without pants?”

There are various photographs of me standing with my rear facing the camera. In these pictures I’m wearing a ten-gallon hat, holding a little pistol, and my unmentionables are showing.

“Sean was very chilly that day,” my mother would explain.

There are photos from my first day of school. I was with my school friends, holding a huge sack lunch in a supermarket paper bag. Thank God I had my pants on.

I was holding a bag-lunch, likely, because my old man was extremely frugal. I can specifically remember my father used to insist on meeting pizza deliverymen halfway.

Also, my father used to cut my hair on the porch to save money. My dad was not a trained aesthetician, but used the Eyeball Method. He would shave one side, then the other. He pronounced the haircut finished when I looked like Uncle Fester.

The Little League pictures. Those are hard to look at. I was a chubby first baseman. My uniform fit me like sausage casing. Our coach, Mister Danny, stands beside our team. His face is glowing, he has a red nose, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and a lit one in his fingers, too. Those were different times.

There is the photo of me shooting pool. Me attempting to play the mandolin. The picture of me learning to drive a 1977 Chevette with Uncle John. The Disney World trip.

There is a photograph of me getting married.

In the photo, I am no longer chubby. I am walking down the aisle with a beautiful young woman. We’ve just been pronounced Mrs. and Mister Dietrich. The look on my face is blindingly happy.

The photos of the reception are even better. The room is filled with staunch hardshell Baptists who suffered from severe clinical constipation. But the photos show me at the cake table, shoving cake into my wife’s mouth. We are wonderfully laughing. We are happy.

You can see on our faces that we don’t know what’s coming. We have no idea that life is not easy. She doesn’t know she won’t be having kids, and nobody will ever be calling her “Mommy.” We don’t know that we will endure the failures, setbacks, unpaid bills, illness, deaths of loved ones, and SEC defeats.

The one thing we know; the one thing I DO see in this photo; is blind love. I remember that, only hours before this photo was taken, the misinformed Baptist preacher sat us down and told us authoritatively, “You can’t live on love, kids,” and somehow we both knew that he was wrong.

Because you can.

You absolutely can.