8 June—Now that the Altice-Cablevision-Optimum server is no longer censoring and sequestering my incoming email, I’ve been able to get important past-due notices from enterprises I’ve never done business with, Altice itself, and old acquaintances whom I’d forgot.

Having left a brilliant future behind me, I don’t ordinarily broadcast my curriculum vitae, the details of my unfulfilled promise. But in the circumstance, given Altice’s corrected server algorithm and an old acquaintance who evidently hasn’t forgot me, here’s the exception:

Truth be told, I myself had forgotten about the time a little over six decades ago when I lived in Scotland and, among other things, had an unhealthy addiction to golf and owned a little chicken farm, on which I raised male chickens—what in the United States we call roosters and the Brits call cocks—just to be slaughtered and ground up to make kosher sausages. It should go without saying that I’m not proud of my golf addiction, of course, nor of what neighbors called the chicken ranch because I was a Yank—for different reasons, to be sure. But it must be said.

I was reminded of my shameful albeit promising past just the other day when I received an email from a woman whose name I didn’t recognize. No problem there for any number of reasons. My (very) old emailing lady friend may have been married a time or three in 60 years, for instance, or may even have been what the Brits call a bloke who morphed into what the Brits used to call a bird and politically incorrect Americans called a babe or broad.

My obviously British correspondent and old acquaintance must have a much better memory than mine, especially given her (perhaps formerly his) advanced years. First, she must have been a golf buddy. Yes, I did have lady golf buddies (titled ladies, as it happens), even though they weren’t allowed to play with the boys at the Royal and Ancient, which is why we’d magnanimously play at public courses to accommodate them.

In all events, my enthusiastic correspondent clearly remembers the novel lingual way I’d celebrate sinking my putts, which certainly was exciting. In fact, the ritual brought good luck, so many of my golf buddies adopted it. Certainly the celebratory ritual may have been less than sanitary, but HHS Secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr. would doubtless approve of it.

My correspondent also remembers that because I supplemented my chickens’ quotidian fowl diet with tsimmis (sweet vegetable stew) and matzo meal my extra-tasty roosters were valued by the kosher (and halal) abattoirs of London, Manchester, and Glasgow and served at the finest restaurants in the UK.

But the poor old thing, not having touched base with me over the better part of a century, doesn’t realize that I no longer even play golf nor that I’m now a vegetarian.

So you can imagine how taken aback I was to receive an email from Misty Angel, my old British friend with the new name and great memory, with the subject line “How about we get together so I can lick your balls and eat your cock.”

Those were the days . . .