I found old photographs in the attic today. I rifled through—literally—thousands of old Polaroids of me naked.

Most were infant pictures of me. I was a fat baby. People were actually concerned about me as a newborn. “Have you seen Sue’s baby?” people would say. Then they would inflate their cheeks.

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 little butt from the camera. In fact, I found many pictures wherein my hindquarters were 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 when I was a kid.

“Can I refill your tea?” my mother would ask people in our parlor. “Would you like to see my son’s butt?”

There are various photographs of me standing by the fireplace, my rear facing the camera. In these pictures I’m wearing a ten-gallon hat, holding a little pistol. I am 3 years old, and my unmentionables are showing.

My mother would show these pictures to visitors and say, “Sean was very chilly that day.”

There are photos from my first day of school. I was holding a huge sack lunch in a supermarket paper bag. All my classmates held Evel Knievel lunch boxes, or Charlie’s Angels pales. Whereas my paper bag was large enough to feed a family of eight.

I can only guess that the supermarket bag was a result of miserly parents.

My parents were extremely frugal. My mother was Scottish, my father was German. Legend has it that on their first date, my father did not bring a bouquet, but a packet of carnation seeds. I can specifically remember my mother used to meet pizza delivery men halfway.

My mother used to cut my hair on the porch to save money. My parents were not trained aestheticians, but this didn’t stop them.

My father purchased horse clippers from the Army surplus store; my mother did the honors. Mama used the Eyeball Method. She would shave one side, then the other. She pronounced the haircut finished when my brain matter started showing.

I found a few yearbook pictures of me in the box. I look like an extremely young Marine.

The Little League pictures, however, were my favorite. 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, and he has a red nose because always carried snakebite medicine to practice.

There is the photo of me learning to cook barbecue. Me learning to play the mandolin. My first dance. The picture of me learning to drive a 1977 Chevette with Uncle John. There is a photo of me with my first typewriter.

There is a photograph of me getting married.

In the photo, I am no longer chubby. I am walking down the aisle with a young woman. We’ve just been pronounced Mrs. and Mister Dietrich. The look on my face is enough to light up three counties.

The photos of the wedding reception are even better. The room is filled with staunch Freewill Baptists who struggled with constipation and were unable to recognize each other in the liquor store.

But the photos show me at the cake table, shoving cake into my wife’s mouth. We are laughing wildly. We are happy.

You can see on our faces that we don’t know what’s coming. We have no idea that we won’t be able to have kids. We don’t know that we will endure deaths, illnesses, unpaid bills, and SEC defeats.

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

Because you can.

You absolutely can.