It’s been a few years now since the last fairy winged her way to an undisclosed location, as inevitably happens when little girls grow up.

But we’re luckier than most. My daughter may have outgrown her friends in the fairy world, but she hasn’t lost her sense of magic or her ability to find enchantment in the ordinary. And I hope she never will.

Magic, it seems to me, is one of the great untapped solaces of adult life. We don’t believe in it, so we fail to see it manifested in the world around us. Like the silver bell that stops tinkling by the end of “The Polar Express,” the magic of everyday life ceases to exist once Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are consigned to the dusty attic of early childhood.

It took motherhood for me to once again connect with the world of possibilities unproven by the scientific method or evidence that could pass muster in a court of law.

It was so joyful to get swept up in a little girl’s excitement over receiving a note from Santa’s elf or a little boy’s desire to set off in search of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Because they could embrace the magical, I learned to do it, too. I started to see magic in the way shoots poke through the frozen ground, in the power of a work of art and in a midsummer night’s moon.

As a family, we learned to look very closely at the world around us — the smallest bugs, the smoothest rocks, the most glorious blooms — and found they inspired a most incredible sense of wonderment, like the handful of days in every life that are absolutely golden.

Magic speaks to something in the human animal that no amount of education or maturity need overcome. That’s a blessing, because those who can see the magic in daily life will also find it easier to embrace the loftier concepts of grace and faith.

If  “faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen,” how much distance really is there between the magical and the miraculous? Between elves and angels? In either case, an open and believing heart is essential.

God works in mysterious ways. A rainbow can be sunlight refracted through raindrops — or it can be a benediction. Reflected light from passing cars can be an intrusion in a darkened bedroom — or it can be fairies winging their way home.

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing,” said George Bernard Shaw.

If magic is child’s play, perhaps we should take care never to relinquish it.

What was once a minor irritation — sign-offs without warning, the need to bounce back and forth to the home page repeatedly in an attempt to sign back in — has become a one-way trip to the the looney bin.

Not only am I required to take four steps to sign into my email account — home page, sign-in page, home page, inbox — but I can now only access one mailbox at a time. To see my other mailboxes (i.e. the ones I use to conduct various aspects of my business), I must sign out and sign back in just to see if there is new mail in the box.

It’s about a 45-second process, done at least 200 times per day, 25 days a month minimum. If time is money, I’m paying through the nose just to access my damn e-mail.

Close to a breakdown, I called Comcast to report this appalling oversight in their ballyhooed new application.  I spent more than an hour on the phone with a supervisor — never settle for a line person, always go straight to a super — trying first just to access my secondary mailboxes and, second,to convey my enormous dissatisfaction with their sxqw@!$@sxa! “upgrade.”

“Look how much time we’re wasting on this,” I pointed out in frustration.

“I don’t consider this a waste of time,” the supervisor said.

“That’s because you’re getting paid to do it,” I said. “Who’s paying me? Do I get to deduct my hourly rate from my Comcast bill?”

That’s what “customer service” has come to — nothing, not even a vague memory of taking care of the people who pay for your goods or services.

How can an email provider that offers up to six mailboxes per account fail to recognize that some — many? most? — of their clients will need to bounce back and forth between those boxes. Or that millions of their customers aren’t jealously guarding their stupid Comcast accounts from the middle of a busy workplace, but casually working out of a home office where signing on and signing off ad nauseum represent bad service, not good security.

But what are my choices? Find new email software or another carrier and switch over to new addresses or, at the very least, lose every address and important email I’ve stored for years?

Tell Comcast to take a hike, transfer my business to a different company and deal with all of the above plus the need for new hookups?

I’ve been down this road before, and it’s pocked with more aggravation than anyone should have to spend long hours handling.

So maybe I’ll content myself for now with dissing Comcast at every chance I get. Via email and the internet, of course.

For months he’s been increasingly downbeat about the nation’s economic outlook and about his job in asset management, the decisions for which have been largely taken out of his hands and reassigned to some muckety-muck in New York.

So when I heard he was up for a job review, I held my breath. With heads rolling all over the country, his job security didn’t sound all that great. I frankly expected the worst.

I shouldn’t have worried. He not only got an acceptable review, he got a bonus.

A bonus, compliments of you, Mr. and Mrs. America and that nice, fat government welfare program, TARP.

And I hear he wasn’t alone. No,  Wall Street financial institutions generously granted some $18 billion in bonuses last year, no doubt after waiting for those desperately needed bailout checks to clear.

Call it hubris, call it shameful, as President Barack Obama did, or just sit there with your jaw hanging open in dumbfounded silence.

What part of “moral fiber” do these people not understand?

Of course, morality is so 20th century. Make that early 20th century. For a long time now, the maxims of our era have been somewhat less altruistic than those our country once embraced.

You snooze, you lose, Bozo. Get while the getting’s good. Look out for Number One. Greed is good.

The bottom line for these Wall Street sharks is: They got theirs. You didn’t. Ha, ha, sucker.

Here’s the irony. A lot of those folks — and my brother is among them — could talk all day long about the failures of Big Government and the fiasco that is the Welfare State.

As my brother — God love him — has told me more times than I can count: “More government is not the answer.”

Except, it seems,  when it comes to those annual bonus checks, which no financier in his/her right mind can envision living without.

Suddenly no one but the most slovenly and unambitious were satisfied with their houses. It didn’t matter if you lived in an apartment or a gated community, one episode of “House Hunters” or “What’s My House Worth?” and you were convinced you needed more. More square feet. More granite. More stainless steel appliances. More landscaping. More media rooms. More style. You deserved it.

I’ve been an apologetic HGTV junkie for years, despite my frustration at watching 20-somethings embark on their first house search with a list of expectations and requirements most people twice their age have long since learned to live without.  And comfortably.

Over and over, show after show, they offer the same tired phrases about master bathrooms that don’t cut it because they’re too small or don’t have the double basins essential to civilized living. Or the houses that get jettisoned from the list because they don’t have  dual offices or enough bathrooms to accommodate every family member. Or the cute little jokes about the walk-in closet being just adequate for her clothes and shoes.

It’s an entitlement mentality, the same one evidenced on TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress,” where 24-year-old schoolteachers try mightily to keep to a $5,000 budget for a strapless wedding gown.  Or the penchant of middle-school girls — whose  “income” derives from the occasional babysitting job — for luxury leather goods.

Where did it come from? Maybe the Journal is right. Let’s blame HGTV or E! or the hundreds of other outlets that so relentlessly traffic in reports of excess that we all begin to think it’s our rightful due.

Somewhere along the way, the average Jane or Joe decided if it – granite counter tops, a $50,000 wedding, a palacial home — was good enough for celebrities, hereditary royals and other rich folk, it was good enough for them. Whether they could afford it or not. After all, that’s what 100 percent financing and hefty credit card limits are for, right?

As best as I can determine, the Age of Entitlement arrived  some time in the 1990s.  Until then, a middle-class kid still knew their limits. Even the wealthy were content with laminate counter tops and a beater car for getting back and forth to high school.

For a real eye-opener, check out  Ordinary People, the 1980 Academy award-winning film about  dysfunctional family  life in the upscale suburb of Lake Forest. The wealthy lifestyle depicted is modest by today’s standards. Really, really modest.

Sure, the streets are manicured and the family home imposing, but the kitchen isn’t much different than the one in my working-class parents’ house and the furnishings lack today’s upscale design aesthetic.

The tax attorney father goes for his morning jog in standard-issue sweats, not $75 anti-microbal, moisture-wicking Elastene running pants. And his high school son knocks around in plaid shirts, ratty sweaters and no-name jeans.

Clearly, the definition of “the good life” has change radically in the last generation and along with it, the expectations of every man, woman and child in America — expectations fueled by HGTV, if Sollisch has it right.

But as foreclosure rates spiral one thing seems certain:  House Hunters and those other HGTV offerings may be reality shows,  but the life they depict is far from realistic.

That’s how a friend sums up the connection that exists between woman who meet once a month to share their thoughts on literature and much, much more.

There is daily existence, with its constant press of family, friends, work and responsibilities, and there is that single evening of conviviality shared month after month, year after year by women who may not socialize at all in their day-to-day lives.

If it isn’t exactly a text-book definition of friendship that binds book club members, it’s something equally valuable and just as strong.

Today’s book clubs — and their popularity has soared in the last decade — serve a similar function to the coffee klatches of my mother’s generation or the play groups to which so many of us toted our babies 10 or 20 years ago.

They don’t just get us out of the house; they also bring the solitary pastime of reading into the collective domain, where it can be debated and deliberated.

For more than a decade, I’ve enjoyed the often raucous, sometimes heart-breaking meetings of the Love in Tokyo book club. The name, a puzzlement to almost everyone, was plucked from the pages of Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.”

(Love-in-Tokyos, according to the book, are those coated rubber bands with beads attached that have secured the ponytails of almost every little girl on the planet.)

I’m convinced the success of any book club relies upon members’ willingness to be absolutely uninhibited in their discussion, passionately defending their viewpoints and never shrinking from a debate.

My book club friend attributes the bond to meeting in each other’s homes with nothing but our opinions and a glass of wine to offer.  “It encourages a kind of intimacy,” she says.

I’ve come to see my fellow members, all of whom have children older than mine, as wise yentas full of good advice and counsel or as a sisterhood whose shared experiences can be far more dramatic than those found in the pages of the latest best-seller.

We’ve discovered the depth of our bond the hard way. In just 11 years, we have suffered job losses, broken marriages and far more sickness than seems possible among a group of women who are just now reaching 50.

Our first loss was one of our own. Our friend was a voracious reader, an articulate and thoughtful commentator,  a woman who knew how to be both clever and kind.

Early in her battle with cancer, our book club offered support with meals and get-well cards and upbeat messages. Later, we watched and prayed from a remove, finally wearing our love-in-Tokyos on our lapels and around our wrists as we celebrated her life and paid tribute to her memory.

Sadly, her’s wasn’t the only loss. In recent years, a husband has fallen to cancer and another has battled it, while a son wages his own fight against drugs.

All this in a pleasant neighborhood of comfortable homes and tree-lined streets, among a circle of friends who also have enjoyed their share of life’s many pleasures and privileges, from vacations and weddings to home remodels and accomplished children.

There is life and there is book club — and sometimes they overlap.

“The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one’s encounter with it in a book, Andre Maurois said.

The same can be said for book club.

Like many Americans, I looked at Barack Obama and saw a smart, charismatic leader. I saw his wife and daughters and admired their beauty and confidence.  That their skin color is different than mine seemed to barely register in the pomp and precision of the day.

This isn’t to detract from the satisfaction black Americans must feel to see one of their own sons finally installed as leader of the free world.  Rather, it’s to underscore the subtle change that has taken place  in the last generation.

Like many cultural changes, the effort to dislodge racism has been so long and so hard that it took  the inauguration of the first black president to point out just how successful it ultimately has been.

I’ve noticed that my own children seem scarcely aware of the racial divisions that once tore this country apart. They’ve have grown up with a very different concept of race than I absorbed in the 1960s,  against a backdrop of  marches and riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the presidential campaign of George Wallace.

Their generation sees race as just another physical characteristic, like blond hair and or short stature. To them, the color of someone’s skin has nothing to do with the person within.

But perhaps nothing proclaims how far we’ve come – -not even the election of a black president – - as much as looking at the inaugural podium and seeing only a man.