It is officially my birthday where I live. I am 46 years old today. I have an amazing and wonderful wife, a passionate and brilliant girlfriend, two awesome (grown) daughters, four friends I can absolutely depend upon, a house we are buying from the bank---with brand new siding---a reliable, six-year old car, and a solid, reliable job with a great boss.

My kitty died this year, but I have a new kitty, and she and I are fitting into one another's lives. My brother is haunted by pain and sorrow, but he was an amazing male presence in my daughter's lives, and I can't imagine my house without him in it or often about it. I feel old and fat, and I suppose I am old, though probably not as fat as I feel, but I can still drink my daughters under the table, and hold my own with my g/f and my brother.

A good life. Hard-won, certainly, but a good life. Money could ease many worries, but it would not make the foundation stronger, any more than not having money made it weaker---indeed, I sometimes think that those early years of independence, living with my daughters in the converted coal-bin apartment (it was an apartment, it was just really small, and it was in the basement, and the windows had been coal-scuttles), maybe made our family stronger than the years of plenty, and made the years of in-between just fine.

Happy birthday to me, indeed.