“It gets easier,” someone said recently in referring to long marriages and looking my way for confirmation.

How can I ever thank you? You have been there from the beginning, in the soaring chorus of “Good Day Sunshine” through the car’s tinny radio so many summers ago, and even now you are here, the infectious — in the best way — “Home Tonight.”

The Independent and Dan’s Papers merge, as do the real estate firms Halstead and Brown Harris Stevens.