It saved my life.

I am writing this from the little brick patio in Monterey, where two chairs sit at a small wooden table and the potted plants I have learned to keep alive lean toward the afternoon sun.

It is a small life, by the measure of the one I had — no hillside mansion, no elaborate monthly dinners, no forty-million-dollar trusts dangled across a table.

And it is the first life I have ever fully owned.