I have no idea why that can of Pringles ended up on my snack tray, because I never eat junk like that. I’m more of a health-food nut — Fritos or Cheetos. Never Pringles.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think it would kill the mood if I was a young guy on a hot date that started getting pretty steamy, but before any garments hit the floor I had to run to my filing cabinet to pull out another “copulation consent form” for my panting partner to sign.

The first time was a few days ago, when I picked up a few gadgets for my friend’s grandson, who had recently undergone serious spinal surgery in Chicago. Vincent will be spending a lot of time healing flat on his back, so I wanted to give him some things to take his mind off the boredom.

Her finances are tidy and orderly — or at least she thought they were. She bundles her mortgage, property tax and home insurance into an escrow account, and when they all come due, the bank writes a check. Done and done.

Last Christmas was the first Christmas I spent without my wife in almost a half-century. She had passed away from a Valentine’s Day stroke in 2018, and I spent last Christmas day in Florida, paddling alone in my kayak, feeling the tides change.

But this Christmas, almost two years after Gail’s passing, I had other thoughts on my mind.

That’s why, as I stood in Southwestern Michigan in October, listening to the guy casting into the Black River as it flowed into Lake Michigan, I kept listing for the moment his tales started to stretch beyond believability.

It was a beautiful leather jacket, the kind I could never afford when they were in style decades ago. The leather was soft and supple (“like buttuh” some might say) and it fit me perfectly. It was the bomber style I love, with snap closures at the wrist, leather collar, and zip-up front. Slash pockets on the side, and two internal pockets with buttons to close them for security. Even a zip-out liner for extra warmth on cold, windy days.

“Do you want to pull it?” I asked Olivia as she sat at the dinner table, wiggling that little bicuspid in her lower jaw. She had three teeth in her head that were ready to jump ship, but this one was likely to be the first to weigh anchor.

Someone, for example, like major league umpire Rob Drake, who on October 22 tweeted this threat: “I will be buying an AR-15 tomorrow, because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT this way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL WAR!!! #MAGA2020.”

But things change.

Well, to be honest, the machine was actually a 2012 Subaru Outback. But it had no trouble carrying us back into the past.

I don’t know if it was loaded, because I never pulled the trigger. It may have had a safety that would have kept it from firing if I had pulled the trigger, but I don’t know. I just pointed it here and there and pretended I was shooting bad guys. I squinted one eye and stuck my other eye into the end of the barrel to see what it looked like down there.

And so near the end of the show I called for the band to swerve out of our set list so I could sing “Brown-Eyed Girl” and dedicate it to her. The crowd of more than 800 erupted in applause for this energetic little 8-year-old girl — the real headliner of the night.

After all, there are psychics, and then there are psychics. The fake ones should be put in jail for lying to us about their phony abilities. The real ones should be put in jail for not telling us when an earthquake or tornado is about to hit.

I call her “she,” of course, because her voice is female. And I’m glad she’s female, because who wants to put all your faith in some disembodied guy’s voice when you’re lost? We men are idiots when it comes to finding our own way, because we always think we can get there without asking directions. So that directional dashboard dude is probably just as lost as I am and is faking it to preserve his fragile manhood.

But besides visiting the campus, high on my list of things to see was the little cottage at 435 N. Chandler Street.

He says it so often you would think he invented the phrase: “Enemy of the people.” He says it every time he refers to the press, that most American of institutions that our Founding Fathers insisted on protecting when they drafted our First Amendment, the most urgent document of them all, guaranteeing our most important rights that most clearly define what it means to be an American.

Anyway, the deal went down the way it always does — Sue, the dental hygienist, asks me to open my yap, and after taking a gander she says: “Wow, wisdom teeth!”

Take his asparagus study, for example.

OK, I’m faking it, because I’ve only seen a couple episodes of GoT over the past seven years or so. But I’ve read plenty about it — or at least just enough to know that it’s cool to call it GoT.

It’s not that Easters didn’t “happen” for me over the past several years. But this was the first one in years that I spent in the good old-fashioned way: inundated by an infestation of kids.

My grandson Jack jumped immediately to telekinesis, the power to move objects with his mind. “Well,” I said, “of course we’ll have to have some limits to our powers, right? I mean, I’d hate to find that you plunked the moon into my back yard.”

“OK,” he said, “what are my limits?”