Our granddaughter has been living on tenterhooks of nervous hope and anticipation ever since she submitted her early applications for university. She used her Grade 11 academic average, just a tad under 85, in the hopes that her applications would bear fruit. She had spent the entire summer before diligently searching out the information she needed to determine which of Canada's universities would best serve her academic, and eventually, professional needs.

No detail was too insignificant for her to consider in her passionate determination to pursue studies that would follow through to her pursuit of a law career. Although she is a very hard worker, consumed with doing the best her grey matter would allow in presenting class-assigned materials to gain her recognition as a potential scholar with well defined plans for her future, she always bemoaned the fact that her intimate girlfriends were cleverer than she, able effortlessly to gain high marks that somehow always seemed to escapee her. She wanted her grade point average to be in the mid-90s, at the very least.

Her friends, she always told me, are brilliant, whereas she is a plodder. A plodder, I remind her, with brains, determination and high aspirations, a plodder meant to study law, with an orderly cranium accepting of incremental details. As long as she was prepared to apply herself and work hard to attain her goal, it would never elude her.

Her first acceptance came a month following the original applications, from Dalhousie; it was an acceptance from a university with an excellent reputation and a highly-regarded law faculty. She was holding out for her first two choices, University of Toronto or York University. Despite her uncles telling her she could go anywhere her first year, then transfer to either of her first choices, she was desperately committed in her mind to an initial attendance at her first-choices, then continuing her academic career there, and nowhere else.

Yesterday came her acceptance from York University and she is in Heaven over it. The only thing that could possibly surpass her euphoria over that acceptance would be one from University of Toronto where she would like to obtain her undergraduate degree then go on to focus on the study of law.