yarn  (yärn) n. 1. A continuous strand of twisted threads of natural or synthetic material, such as wool or nylon, used in weaving or knitting. 2. Informal A long, often elaborate narrative of real or fictitious adventures; an entertaining tale. I’m coming up on a birthday in a couple of days, number seventy-seven; and as is almost always the case when I approach another of these milestones (good word, that), I am reminded that life is good. The reminder that life is good comes in different ways under varying circumstances.  When I was teaching I had the marvelous privilege year after year of introducing rooms full of seventeen/eighteen-year-olds to yarns told  by the greatest storytellers who ever lived.  We watched and listened as Homer told of Achilles‘ reaction to the news that his beloved friend Protroclus had been killed by Hector.  We listened to Hamlet thinking out loud as he tried to decide whether to suck it up and go on tolerating a bad situation, or to take aggressive action against an evil uncle, or to get out of the whole mess by killing himself. We listened to Macbeth tell us that “life is a tale told by an idiot-- full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  Robert Frost told us about his “lovers quarrel with the world,”  and William Carlos Williams told us so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens."  Wow!  Life really is good... up to and beyond age seventy-seven.