Wednesday's child

Wednesday's child is full of woe...

So claims the old nursery rhyme. I was born on a Wednesday, and now the clocks and calendars have ticked their way around to make my birthday a Wednesday again, landing where I started off oh so many years ago.

It's not the most spectacular of birthdays -- I'm home nursing a cold that would probably be going away by now if I'd taken better care of it sooner. But, as usual, crisis piled on crisis, urgency upon urgency, and 30,000 emails that I'd been inquiring about for the past ten months suddenly had to be handled immediately, and I went in to work on two drizzly days that now seem to have replicated themselves in my nostrils and lungs. I still had to do an urgent conference call this morning, but at least I got to do it lying down.

But I'm seldom woeful anymore, despite the gloomy predictions of Mother Goose. I'm grateful for all my blessings, mostly that I continue to find everything so interesting. I'm insatiably curious about this world, and amazed and awestruck by its infinite charms. Which do outweigh -- if only by a sliver, a hair, a quark -- the almost overwhelming list of its sorrows and tragedies.

They have not left me unscathed. But as Elton John might say, I'm still standing.

The picture is for no particular reason except that I've always liked it, me sitting on a hotel balcony in Paris on a June evening in 1995.