I had a good year, no two ways about it.

In April, I won second place in the state for column writing, and in October the International Association of Firefighters gave me first place for a feature story I did about our local 710 boys.

I wore a coat and tie down to Boise in April to listen to my name called during the banquet. They call out a lot of names at those things, and everyone tips wine waiting for their turn. Still, it felt pretty good. The local 710 boys have already taken care of me. They gave me a name plate like the ones the real firefighters wear on their helmets.

Coeur d'Alene, it says. Hasslinger.

I have it propped on my desk, next to some financials. Sometimes I pick it up and feel the leather. It's the only thing I have on my desk made out of leather.

Good years are nothing to sneeze at, and I know enough to know that. One year, I lived in my parents' basement and took up bicycling, then got plowed by a truck somewhere around 40th Avenue in Yakima, Wash.

"Things are starting to break," I said to myself.

So I decided to double down and try and marry a Swede I met 10 years ago, named Cecilia. Eleven years, actually, when I lived in Europe, pretending to be an artist. Now I had a job. That counted for something.

My plan was just to show up. After that, well.

"Hell of a plan," my friend said when I told him over beers, because plans like that sound great over beers. Good years, though, they're something to be a part of, so the next week I booked a ticket to Stockholm. It was the end of October.

"October, huh?" Cecilia asked me after I arrived, 17 hours in the air. "It's too bad about all the rain."

When you don't have a plan you have to fudge a little, so I lied and said summers were busy. That part was true, but in autumn, things slow enough I knew I could monopolize time. It's a strategy, more than a plan, and she went ahead and let my lie go.

But it was the hardest rain I'd ever seen. It drove diagonally over the rooftops, bounced off the cobbled streets and turned the bridges over the canals into lines in the fog. And my feet were always wet. After I learned, I carried around an extra pair of socks in my sweater pocket.

The strategy was pretty solid.

We had salmon in the Soldermalm neighborhood, went to the National Museum, and drank Visby beers in the Pelikan, whose twin restaurant down the street was the opening scene of a Mafia novel.

I had time for other things, too.

In Germany, I rented a bicycle in Berlin and pedaled every inch of it. I pedaled across the Alexander Place to the museum island, the opera house, and the Berliner Dome, on the bank of the River Spree. In Freiburg, at the foot of the Black Forest, my friend who never left was initiated into a fraternity. He's 32, from Connecticut, and the ceremony was done by piano and candlelight and the senior members, in their 20s, wore coats and white gloves and slammed their swords on the wooden tables.

"I tell you," my friend said. "Old School has a whole new meaning to me."

You can have a bang up time pretending you're an artist and it was fun seeing it all this time, but with a job. And the best part of Europe is you can eat and drink like a king but you burn it all off walking.

We were on a walk, back in Soldermalm, when Cecilia cut me a deal. She said there were careers to launch and futures to shape but if things looked the same in five years, come back and ask again.

"Deal," I said.

I took it and ran. That's what happens in good years, things fall in your lap. The only thing left was to believe it. The year was closing, things would carry over, and other years would stack up. That's the way it worked and that's what you had to believe. I was waiting for my feet to dry, actually, sitting on a footstool by then, telling myself exactly that.

Tom Hasslinger is the city reporter at The Coeur d'Alene Press. He can be reached at 664-8176 ext. 2010 or by email at thasslinger@cdapress.com