Last summer, freed of the seemingly-interminable mounds of school assignments, our granddaughter focused her attention on doing the research required to make her as knowledgeable as possible about undergraduate university programs available at Canadian universities to decide which one would rank highest in her estimation to prepare her to pursue a law degree. She focused on a number of universities, foremost among them the University of Toronto, but felt it to be a long shot, for her.

Eventually she made application to Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, York University and University of Toronto both in Toronto, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Dalhousie was the first to respond affirmatively, then came York, and finally U. of T. She hadn't completed her Simon Fraser application, deeming it much too far from home to venture there.

Last week she had another program acceptance from York University; she had applied to two different undergraduate courses there. But it was too late, she had already notified University of Toronto that she meant to accept their invitation to join their student body, since it was her first choice, to begin with.

Away back in the summer she would speak with me for hours about the details she had discovered; once having found most of the academic information she was seeking she set out to discover which of the residences she thought were most to her liking. Her appraisal turned up a converted hotel on Chestnut Street in downtown Toronto, as the ultimate creme de la creme of university residences and dreamed how wonderful it would be to both attend the university of her choice and do so living in residence at such a comfortably promising looking place.

As it happened the university directed her attention to three residences which she could select from and one of them was the residence on Chestnut Street, to her amazement. She chose it as her first choice, then ranked the other two. And last week she was advised by the university administration that she had been approved for residence at the very place she had daydreamed of. It is a two-bedroom suite, with a small bathroom and kitchenette, to be shared with someone the administration will take steps to pair her with who seems to reflect her personality and values.

When I was a very young child, much younger than our granddaughter by a decade, my father worked on Chestnut Street as a factory labourer at a company called Fashion Hat & Cap. He was a steamer, working on a device that steamed the hats and caps into their final finished shape. Some of his later health problems might have arisen from his constant exposure to his working atmosphere, some to the deprived conditions under which he was raised in extreme poverty, in a little shtetl in Poland accustomed to pogroms. His parents' ill health left  him an orphan at twelve.

How utterly amazed he would have been at the future, how pleased he would have been to know his children and his children's children and their children were able to attend university. All the more so as he valued education so highly and throughout his life made every effort to educate himself.