I'm thinking we might be, the three of us, triplets.

Given up at birth, knocked around the foster home system for most of the next four years. Adopted by a couple who, I've come to believe, wanted children because all their friends had some. Dad was a functioning alcoholic which, in the 50's and 60's, was more common than not for lower middle class families. The alcohol helped blot out what their lives had NOT turned out to be.

Dad had decided early on what my career was going to be. I was going to go to Michigan Tech in the upper peninsula and come out a metallurgical engineer. I hate cold, I really hate snow, and working in a factory my whole life wasn't anything I'd ever imagined. A vet? Yup, love animals. An oceanographer? Yeah, always loved the water. His response was easy to interpret, "get the fuck out, I don't care what you do but you'll get no help from me. The day you graduate high school you're on your own you ungrateful little shit."

Per Riff, several questionable career choices later and after a much too soon marriage was over I finally, in 1999, found my true calling and spent the final 21 years of my working life looking forward to going to work every day. Liz and I found each other almost 16 years ago to the day. Finally found some birth family at the end of 2019 and that's worked out better than expected.

Liz wonders why I'm such an early riser. I had to think about that myself because I'm far enough into retirement that it's not just "habit" any more. I figured it out. It's simply a matter of being so happy that I look forward to and want to see what the day holds. There were long periods in my life when that wasn't the case...