The night before my eighteenth birthday, I was thirty-seven years old.

Not the first time. The first time I was seventeen. Just like you'd expect of an ordinary person. Because I was an ordinary person. I really couldn't pinpoint what put me over the edge, but something did.

So, when it came down to what I want to tell you about today, yes: The night before my second eighteenth birthday, I was thirty-seven.

Doesn't really make it all that much clearer, does it? I'm sorry.

I'll get there.

Meanwhile, let's start someplace else. The day before my thirty-eighth birthday, I was on a boat — a yacht, really — off the coast of Miami, Florida, drenched in the kind of blue-water, sunny-day perfection you see on the cover of Condé Nast Traveler and other luxury magazines. It was absolutely, stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful.

By all accounts, mine was a stunning, beautiful, absolutely breathtaking luxury life.

I hadn't grown up that way. No one who grows up with over-the-top luxury bothers to appreciate it or describe it in detail. They take it for granted, while the rest of us either dream about it or — as in my case — are perfectly contented until someone swoops us out of our easy anonymous life and plops us down into the middle of some political existence, major or minor, literal or figurative.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In my youth, I'd enjoyed a happy, Charlie Brown–landscaped, middle-class life in Potomac, Maryland, close enough to the D.C. border that you could ride a bike there (if you were ambitious). Summers were muggy and smelled of hot pavement and beer at a field party down River Road; fall was always cool and crisp, underlined by the sounds of fiery red and gold leaves (matching the ubiquitous Redskins jerseys) skidding across sidewalks and streets; winters crunched with snow and carried the scent of wood smoke that drifted lazily out of brick chimneys until the inevitable flat and depressing gray stretch that was February and March, when everyone drew into their homes and stopped any festivities, holding their breath for the relief of anything other than the long dark winter of the D.C. suburbs.

But then spring burst forth in a pastel fireworks show of azaleas, daffodils, cherry blossoms — the trees that lined my side of Fox Hills were cherry blossoms, until they all died off, and the other side of the neighborhood had Bradford pears, which I think lasted longer — and the burst of whatever spring nature gave brought the happy smiles of residents who hadn't quite believed it would ever warm up again.

Ours was not a neighborhood of rose competitions or any other attempts to outdo each other's optimism; it was a place where everyone did their best to nourish cheer and no one sought to outdo another, because the point was to hasten the gray winter along as best we could, as best we all possibly could.

The rich in our town had old money and horses and bridal paths; the rest of us had bikes and neighborhood pools and solid American cars to take us to the mall or dinner out at Normandie Farm or, on really special occasions, the Peter Pan Inn in Urbana. It was a half-hour drive through the dark but it always ended in a deep-velvet-red dining room and the best Shirley Temple drinks I ever had.

I was a math kid, always loved it, always excelled at it. I couldn't understand how anyone had trouble with math, when it was the most straightforward thing in the world. To me, that would be like not understanding how to breathe. Nothing else in life is so dependable: you plug the right formula in with the right numbers, do the puzzle, and get the answer right every single time.

My dad was a banker and he loved that I shared this quality with him. Early on he taught me sums using coins. When I was five years old he began to teach me about the stock market and how to track a portfolio. He taught me to invest in things I liked, not just things that "made sense." Our first real purchase for my future was one hundred shares of Apple's IPO at $22 a share, because he and I loved to play Alternate Reality together. I saved that stock and added to it for the thirty years that followed, through three splits and a high approaching $250 a share.

Thanks to Dad, I had a nice little nest egg for myself long before I hit it big working with Whitestone, one of the top private equity investment firms in the country.

Believe it or not, I'd never actually been financially ambitious. At least not in the greedy sense. I loved to get it right, to invest well, to have my intuition richly rewarded with high growth and big margins, in short to be good at my job. But I'd never felt like I didn't have what I needed until the little enclave that had been my home since I was born became a very popular metropolitan suburb for bigwigs and the prices escalated well beyond what I or 99 percent of my school classmates could have afforded.

Until Dad died unexpectedly halfway through my college education, that is. Well, I say unexpectedly, but when you smoke three packs of unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes a day, a sudden and devastating stroke can't exactly be characterized as "unexpected." Unfortunate, certainly. Unendurable, very nearly.

But not unexpected.

It was definitely the most formative experience of my life, though. I was twenty years old, and it wasn't what I'd expected. I'd fully expected him to be there for me forever, to fix doorknobs in my first shabby apartment, to advise me when the market wobbled, to walk me down the aisle if and when I found someone I wanted to marry, and, most importantly — and most vivid in my imagination — to be a grandfather to my kids: to throw them up in the air and catch them; to make games of "fishing" with homemade poles held from the second floor of the house for treasures he'd hidden in his shoes.

That was the dad he'd been to me, and that was the granddad I was sure he'd be to my children someday. And, damn it, it was really something to look forward to.

But it was never to be.

My mom later told me she'd feared it for years. So strongly, in fact, that sometimes she had a sneaking suspicion that she'd caused his death by focusing so much attention on that specific dread. But that was nonsense. He smoked, he enjoyed his Irish coffees, he spent his evenings in his easy chair in front of ESPN, and he died.

And life changed. Even though the house was paid off, Mom had a hard time paying the taxes along with all her other expenses, so I had the most important investment assignment of my life: to profitably invest the life insurance payment in a bad market so that she could comfortably live off the dividends.

It's worked out pretty well.

So I was able to sit on the bow of that yacht the day before my birthday, soaking up the sun without many cares in the world.

I was with my best friend, Sammy — whom tackier people would probably call my "gay husband" and which probably gives you a fair idea of him and our relationship — as well as two couples we weren't actually that close to but whom we'd known for a decade and who tended to show up every time there was a party, and Lisa and Larry Springston. Larry was my associate at Whitestone, and Lisa was his wife. She and I had gotten particularly close in the past five years or so, and everyone called us "partners in crime," thanks to a few...