Waking today to my twenty-seventh birthday, I caught my first glimpse of middle age. Last year I was twenty-six, which leans against twenty-five, which means scarcely out of college, still hoisting one's sails, all seas untraveled. But twenty-seven tips and falls toward thirty, which is another era entirely, suggesting children and yard work and settled plans and life figured out. In high school I had a recurring dream of taking a test and realizing the time was almost over, though I was still reading the instructions. The dream was prophetic, for though I've only had time to complete an education, which is reading life's instructions, I have already blazed a third of the way to mortality. My future has shrunk from infinite to countable. Whoever can count his money has too little of it.