Page one

I remember a few years ago one of my best friends made a temporary move to Sydney, Australia. The hardest part, she said, was knowing that she could walk down the street armed with the full, yet sad knowledge that there was absolutely no possibility of bumping into someone she knew.

The sun was beautiful and bright that morning and as I made my way along Point Grey Road, it seemed perfectly natural that he should be there, that he should call out my name, hop of his bike, and we would walk there together.

Tonight, as I sat around a crowded table, filled with pitchers of beer and Diet Cokes, half-eaten plates of pizza and discarded napkins, I looked at the smiling faces around me and remembered, with a deep sense of pleasure, how good it feels to laugh, to really laugh, until tears well in your eyes and threaten to spill.

It made me realize that it is a beginning that is starting, slowly, to take shape and to take hold, and that while the middle and the end remain so strangely unknown, that the first page has been turned.