There's a growing block of people who think I'm a sociopath. How do I know? Because they tell me. Well, they don't tell me, they tell Marty. It typically comes in the form of saying they think something is wrong with me. When Marty asks them why they think that, they say it's because there's no way someone is as happy as Troy appears to be. Marty, with the slightest show of exasperation, will tell them, no, he's that happy. She knows. She lives with said sociopath.

The other morning, while having my daily breakfast with my 22-year-old daughter, she asked how my prior day was. I thought for a moment and told her I was going to answer that question with a story from my day.

Last weekend, word spread down our street that the leaf-sucker-uppers trucks were coming in the next few days, and everyone should rake all of their leaves into the street. Word also came that this year, you could also rake your leaves into the back alley. This is a plus as it reduces how far the backyard leaves have to travel. But Marty questioned this, saying that in more than twenty years, we've never been able to put them in the back alley. Marty was told that Bonnie talked to the worker guys, and they said they were going to do the back alley this year. So Marty raked a whole lot of leaves from the two seventy-five-year-old trees behind our home into the back alley.

Three days later, Marty received, along with five of our neighbors, a notice that she illegally disposed of her leaves by placing them in the back alley. It went on to say the leaves had to be cleared by the end of the week or else we would have to appear in our city's court. Marty dreaded the notion of moving all of those leaves again and with so few day's notice.

A few days later, on an unseasonably warm late-November afternoon, I broke from work early, threw on some gloves, rolled the wheelbarrow to the back alley, and started moving Marty's leaves to the front of the house where they could be picked up by the sucker-truck. If you are wondering why I'm calling them Marty's leaves or why I wasn't helping her--I was out of town when all this happened. I lost count after twenty loads. I'm guessing in all there were somewhere between thirty and forty trips to the front. But what matters to this story is that after filling the wheelbarrow with the last carefully raked bunch of leaves, when I pulled up on the handles, the front wheel of the wheelbarrow fell off. And not like a bolt came loose and slipped from its housing, but like the wood frame had dry-rotted through and the whole structure broke in half.

So that is how my day went. This aged wheelbarrow held on just long enough for me to clear ALL of those leaves, address the violation, as well as surprising my wife when she disovered it was all done. For that last load, I was able to drag the barrow the few feet into the backyard and deposit that last set of leaves in our composter.

Many moments in my life have panned out just like that. There are the big things like being born and put up for adoption, getting the mom I got, having the childhood I had, meeting and marrying Marta, the good health I've experienced, the generous mentors I've crossed paths with, the beautiful, healthy children we were gifted, and on and on and on. And there are lots and lots of the little things, like having a wheelbarrow hang on until the last possible moment before failing me. I don't like to throw the term guardian angel around because I don't know that is what this is. All I know is something is looking out for me, and whatever that something is, it makes people think I'm a sociopath.

So Bella, that is how my yesterday was, undeservedly awesome, as per usual.