Her grandfather mused, sitting at the keyboard yesterday, composing an email message to his only grandchild that took him a very long time to put together and finally send off to her. When she arrived home after school yesterday, she hadn't taken off her jacket before she called us, and that gave him the opportunity to speak with her at some length.

He is imbued with some authority in the matter of where she will be attending university. He wants the best of all possible opportunities for her. And since he's paying her way, apart from the fact that she loves and trusts him, she listens carefully to what he has to say.

Angie, in a group photograph: "Pink" Friday at school

It's a foregone conclusion, she isn't ambivalent necessarily about accepting the offer made to her by the University of Toronto to attend the course she applied for as a precursor to continuing on in the years to come to achieve a law degree. She was struggling within herself to accept that she had prevailed, after all. When we were excited that Dalhousie University had accepted her immediately upon her application, followed by York University's acceptance, we were all for her grabbing the opportunity. She was resolute; she would wait until she heard back from University of Toronto.

It was the premier university and the one she had set her heart on attending. As for us, because she would not give the two universities in Ottawa a second thought, at least attending university in Toronto wouldn't take her as far from us as a Nova Scotia location would. We were prepared, if we had any say in the matter, to encourage her to accept an offer at Simon Fraser University, since her uncle lives in Vancouver, but she had procrastinated and hadn't completed that application, nor the one for University of British Columbia.

She was prepared to leave home, yes, in fact eager to do so, but not as far as British Columbia, though her grandfather urged her to think in terms of it's being only a plane-ride away, and she would be near her uncle, our youngest son.

She wanted me on the telephone line while she went through the process on line of validating the acceptance she'd received from University of Toronto. She gave me a play-by-play role as the audience in the performance. She has links to the university, and that gives her a degree of comfort, though she's not shy of self-confidence. Her aunt by marriage is the chaplain at one of its colleges. One of her great-uncles received his doctorate in botany there over thirty years ago, resulting in his professorship at Dalhousie. Both of her uncles attended University of Toronto.

And now, it's her turn.