Thirty-six years ago I worked for a few months at an upscale restaurant in Nashville. If I remember right, it wasn’t open on Mondays, and one Sunday when I hadn’t been there long, word came down that we had to get the place ready for Bugs Burger Night, which would happen after the restaurant closed that evening.

Before long I understood that meant exterminators were coming to give the restaurant a top-to-bottom treatment, and we had to put away the food and dishes and so on. It was a pretty big deal, this Bugs Burger Night, and the phrase was curious enough to pique my interest. The treatment of course was a regular thing, every few months, so I assumed that “bugs burger” was just restaurant-specific slang passing along from more experienced employees to the likes of me. Fun in the way slang can be. Maybe the exterminators were feeding the bugs a burger of death.

It even inspired me to dream up a title that was never attached to any story: The Long Bugs Burger Night of the Soul. Or The Dark Bugs Burger Night of the Soul.

That oddity was duly tucked away in the part-organized, part-chaotic filing cabinets of my memory. Files that have a way of popping into conscious thought without warning, which I suppose is a function of the chaotic side. That’s all a long way of saying that “Bugs Burger Night” popped into my head the other day. Then I did what we do in modern times: Googled it.

Bugs Burger was part of a brand name. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Pest Management Professional told me about Alvin “Bugs” Burger (d. 2015), founder of Bugs Burger Bug Killers, a Miami-based national exterminator. So professionals from BBBK were coming to the restaurant that night. Though Alvin “Bugs” is gone, the name lives on.

Small pleasures aren’t just the likes of enjoying a favorite old food or a spying a colorful cloud formation or a reading a postcard from an old friend. They can also be intangible, like a small thought from your remote past reappearing for a reinvention in the present.