ON MY BIRTHDAY I ONCE AGAIN REVEAL THE SECRET OF LIFE

This is practically the same birthday column I write every year. Nothing has changed, except I’m a year older and a lot crankier.

So once again let me share with you the secret of life.

The secret of life can be revealed in one word: Family.

I’ve had two wonderful wives, I have five great kids – Donna, Michael, Jodi, Jessie and J.T. – and ten wonderful grandchildren: Zoey, Zach, Jack, William, Annabel, Charlie Maggie, Teddy, Phoebe, and Lucy.

My wife, the beautiful Judy Licht and I have two wonderful children, a daughter Jessie, and a son J.T.

 Jessie married a wonderful man, Ben Gliklich and they’re the proud parents of Teddy and Phoebe.

Our son J.T married the beautiful and brilliant, Rachel Jacobson and they are parents of my latest grandchild, Lucy.

Lucy is beautiful. She’s 15 months old and with her first words she calls me Papa G.

My feeling that family is everything all came to me at another birthday celebration for me that took place 22 years ago at a family beach bonfire. I was sitting cross-legged on the beach in the most uncomfortable position one could be in while one is contemplating his life.

I stared into the fire, and this is what I thought:

I’m lucky. I’m so, so lucky.

I’m lucky because I grew up in Brooklyn and I live in New York City and in the Hamptons and it doesn’t get better anywhere else in the world.

I’ve lived and live in the best of times. The three greatest inventions in the history of mankind have come in my lifetime. Forget about penicillin and splitting the atom. Penicillin is about sickness and the atom is about death.

The three greatest inventions of my, and your, lifetime are:

The George Foreman Grill…EZPass …The cellphone.

Take it from the birthday boy. Eating perfectly grilled food, not waiting on tollbooth lines, and listening to great music or a great book on your phone, are what a good, superficial life is all about.

As the fire burned 22 years ago, I thought about my birthday and how, somehow in my life, I got all the breaks.

I’m lucky because I was in advertising in the 1970s when it was wild and crazy and I was, some would say, among the wildest and the craziest. It came naturally. I survived. I came into advertising in 1961. I was a messenger without much of an education. I was delivering packages for $24 a week.

By 1978 I co-owned a $600 million dollar advertising agency.

I also learned that money isn’t the end-all. I would go out to my fancy L.A. office and my agency-leased Hollywood Hills home and rent a convertible and ride the coast highway alone, obsessively playing the Neil Diamond song “I Am I Said” over and over.

The words of this part of the song were not lost on me:

Did you ever read about a frog

Who dreamed of bein’a king

And then became one

Well, except for the names

And a few other changes

If you talk about me

The story is the same one.”

Then, as I stared at the bonfire, I realized how my family and extended family have grown.

 There, sitting cross-legged with much more ease than me, were our good friends Michael and Nancy Hodin and Andy Saffir and Daniel Benedict. All five of my children and their spouses and their children were enjoying the fire under a blanket of stars and a world-class moon.

I sat and looked at my family, and I thought about how small my family was when I was a kid. It was my brother Joe and me, my mom and dad, and my grandparents.

My wife, the beautiful Judy Licht, who was an only child, grew up in a smaller family than mine.

We never talked about having a big family. It just happened.

Then I realized that when Connie and Michael Della Femina had their first child, they set off a chain that came together here around this beautiful bonfire.

In the end, it’s about family. It’s not about religion or money or power or any of the things we all grow up thinking that matters.

It’s about family.

I looked at my family and watched as the light of the bonfire flickered and reflected on their faces.

 My sweet granddaughter Zoey Hart took her musically talented dad Adam’s guitar from him and started to play and sing. Her lovely voice had its own orchestra of waves that were softly hitting the shore. She’s very talented. That’s just not grandfather talk; that’s the plain old truth.

My daughter, Donna, looking very much like her wonderful mother Barbara, proudly watched and kept a close eye on her son, Zach, who was toasting and consuming marshmallows at an alarming rate.

The firelight made everyone’s eyes sparkle. My daughter Jodi was holding Annabel, whom everyone calls Beanie, the oldest of her now three beautiful children (Charlie and Maggie have been born since then). Maggie at age 17 is a Hampton’s lifeguard. Who would have thought, when I was going into the water in Coney Island, a million years ago, that I would someday be the grandfather of a lifeguard.

Next to her was my son Michael and his wife, the beautiful and sweet and stylish Laurie, and their two handsome sons, Jack and William.

A few years ago, Jack married Allie a stunning woman who is a talented designer and a welcome member of our family.

Now my granddaughter passed her guitar to John Kim, my wonderful son-in-law. John is a born entertainer. He played his guitar and sang in the frat houses of Brown and Harvard, where he went to school. His singing voice is rich, and husky and I hear a lot of Rod Stewart when he sings. John started to play the guitar.

He started singing the old Rolling Stones classic, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”:

“No, you can’t always get what you want

You can’t always get what you want

You can’t always get what you want

But if you try some time, you just might find

You get what you need”

I looked at the faces in the firelight: Judy … Jessie … J.T. … Beanie … Donna … Michael … Laurie … Adam … William … Jack … John … Jodi … Zoey … Zach …

My family. My life.

John’s husky voice filled the soft night air.

“You can’t always get what you want.”

I smiled to myself.

“Oh yes you can,” I thought to myself. “Oh yes you can.”

I know. I did.