Each morning I come in early to work and immediately make myself a tea and review the tasks for the day. I am in earlier that the rest of the crowd at work by at least 2 hours. I arrive shortly after 8 AM, while the rest of the riff raff gets in closer to 10. I cherish these few hours in that it lets me get ahead of the work for the day and I take a few minutes to spit out a blog post. Today however, I am drawing a blank. Even on the car ride in, I drew a blank. I found that to be a shock. The voices of Darren Dreger and Mike Richards (TSN 1050 Radio) were blurred into a singular nebulous inaudible sound.

My wife took her usual position in the passenger seat but we didn’t have our usual conversation. Typically we engage into meaningful babble about what we plan on eating for dinner or how fast our young boy is growing up, status of traffic for an average Monday. Not today however. We were both silent. One of my favorite things to do on my drive to work is to look over at my wife and wonder in amazement how she managed to fall in love with me and become my wife. She doesn’t know I am looking at her, she doesn’t even know what I am thinking. She is being her, eyes closed, stealing a few minutes of sleep.

My eyes return back to focus on the road, which is not hard to do at 20 clicks. Instead of the usual thoughts on what I should write about today, I kept thinking about my future and eventual retirement in 20 years. What will I look like? Will my son still love us and look after us? Will he find a nice wife that can get along with us? When will I get laid off? I catch the negativity swirling in my head and refocus on the positives. I read an article about Bobby Baun and loved how positive he was. He believed that you have to focus on what is good and not the bad. In case you didn’t know, he broke his leg and managed to score a very important goal for the Leafs back in the day. I smiled when I recalled the memory of reading the article about him.

I admire those who always are happy and truthfully happy. I can spot a fake person from a mile away. When you get teased and bullied as much as I did when I was in public school, you learn valuable tricks on who to trust and who not to trust. Once you sift through the insanity of those who feel the need to be something they aren’t, you find a few diamonds in the rough. Those are the ones you hang on to.

The smile on my face is growing. I feel a bit of energy surging in my veins. I have comfort that one of those diamonds is the rough is sitting right next to me. I love her.