Who could ask for more?

"When I get older losing my hair, many years from now, will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine. ... Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?"

I was 18 years old when I first heard those lyrics, and my 64th birthday seemed a time that would never come. Later, when I found my One True Love, we dreamed of a future and allowed ourselves to think of a time when we might be "Doing the garden, digging the weeds, who could ask for more?" with "grandchildren on your knee ...," but even then my 64th birthday seemed as far into the future as the Battle of Gettysburg was in the past.

Now I'm at that place that had seemed so far away that it would never come, and we are, as Paul McCartney, still in his 20s, dreamed of back in 1967. The lyrics remain fresh in my mind ... "you'll be older, too." The intervening years do not seem so long, not a full lifetime.

That future we imagined so long ago has not transpired quite as we dreamed it might, but it has transpired in ways more wonderful than we could have imagined, mixed with disappointments and sadness and grief over those who are not here to share these days of "who could ask for more?"