In recent years I’ve come to believe that during a lifetime, we’re all faced with eight or ten significant decisions. If we are smart enough or lucky enough to get half of them right, or for the truly fortunate, slightly more than half right, we’ll lead a successful life, by whatever metric you choose to define it.

Like anyone with the requisite miles on the odometer, I’ve had an uncountable number of blunders, missteps, hesitations, impulsive decisions, screw-ups, and misguided wanderings down the wrong fork in the road. Numerous times my fingertips have simply grazed, but never grasped, the brass ring. But I’ve also gotten a few things right.

Chief among them, number one with a bullet, was, forty years ago on this very day, marrying Elaine Harris. Known to her late father, little grandkids, loyal sons-in-law and loving husband as Lainey. (Although at home I simply call her ‘Beauty.’)

Optimistic, artistic, individualistic, athletic, empathetic and energetic are just a handful of descriptives that barely scratch the surface. There are many others. When they were little, our children, and now decades later, their children, refer to her as “a good looker and a good cooker.”

This forty-year union has been a mostly happy blur of kids, creativity, lasting (and passing) friendships, sports, fitness, (after all, we met in a NYC gym.) Adventure, travel, (and adventure travel.)

Albeit with the attendant heartache of losing loved ones, health concerns, professional and personal frustrations and the speedbumps, potholes and occasional road closures that confront us all.

Throughout this rich and wrenching tapestry of life, Lainey has been and remains both the bedrock and the wellspring of my gratitude. I honestly don’t know where I’d be without her. The word ‘Grateful’ is wholly inadequate.