I’m surrounded by good causes, by politicians I mostly like wanting campaign donations, by the hospital and many local nonprofits, including the one I work for, needing donations to carry on our missions, and by state and national organizations doing good work who also need my support.

And I am surrounded by people my age and years younger, people mostly retired, who can rise up to support all of these good causes. My small year-end donations are always a math puzzle. I sometimes feel sad about this, wish I could do more, wish that somehow, I would have grasped enough of the money tree to have jobs that paid well, to have asked for raises when I didn’t, to have planned at least a little bit for “retirement.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love the job I have now and have loved almost every day of a 59-year working career. (I count my working career from the day I left grad school in 1965 to join the Peace Corps, swearing never again to do something this year I don’t like in order to do something next year that I want to do.) From Peace Corps volunteer and staff member, I went to County Extension agent in the Wallowas for five years, and then a dozen years at the Bookloft before 20 years at Fishtrap and the past 15 at the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture, two nonprofits always on the edge.

I have met some of the most beautiful people in the world, ambassadors and governors, poets and novelists, college professors and agency heads. Well — not all of them have been beautiful; sometimes up close the warts and blemishes show, the disregard for lesser folks and the striving for personal aggrandizement and power become apparent. But, oh, was the writer Ursula LeGuin a treasure. I wouldn’t take money for the poem she wrote me.

I think I have always admired humility. Some of the most beautiful people, looking back on it all, were the people in my Turkish village, who lived without the modern “comforts” that have become our essentials — and showed me that I could survive heat in the shade and an adobe house without air conditioning. And some of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers; we trained and played and worked together in a new world, teaching each other as we went.

And the many Turks across the country that made my almost five years there some of the best in my life. And, before that, teachers and coaches who made learning and playing so much fun. College roommates, who introduced me to history and good books and politics, and once joined me for three glorious weeks traveling in a VW bus across Greece. It was off-season and we were the only people at Delphi — we checked in with the oracle; and at Olympia, where we tossed the rugby ball Jonathan had thought to bring along as we raced each other in the ancient stadium.

I don’t have to reach back that far to find beautiful people in my life. I’m afraid to start naming my Wallowa mentors and friends, Extension boss and bookstore customers, Fishtrap supporters and town team basketball teammates, ski hill partners, ranchers and business folks who took on a young rube from the tumultuous 1960s and Peace Corps idealism and grounded me here. My Nez Perce friends who have grounded me even deeper in this ancient place.

My dad tried to teach me basic economics and living solid middle class. Although I didn’t excel at it, I did learn to admire my humble dad over uncles and neighbors and customers at the gas station he owned who always had a little more and sometimes flaunted it. I knew my dad was smarter and more capable than most of them, could fix a car — or a radio or TV set, make a Rolleiflex camera work or paint a house. Quietly and almost unintentionally, I determined that wealth was not worth, and that I would never allow it to intimidate me.

Well, good for me! But here I am, wishing I had just a little bit of it. Enough to pay all the bills and be able to come up immediately with the 400 bucks for “unexpected emergencies” that the pollsters worry about. Wishing I could raise my hand to offer a generous bid at the hospital auction or fund a high school scholarship.

Would I do things differently? Not much. Like Minnesota Gov. Walz, I don’t have stocks and don’t miss not having them. But, paying a little bit of attention to saving along the way, to have been occasionally more careful where I spent money, to have written slightly higher salary numbers for me and my fellow workers in the dozens of grants for nonprofits I wrote, might have made life for me — and for the good causes I struggle to support — a little easier.