It was eight years ago today that I met Joy. I was at the birthday party of a mutual friend, Paul Katz, and it was late into the evening. She sat down on the couch and started to give me a hard time about something or other. She can do that better than anyone I know. We talked for a bit, even took a walk around the block, and then we went our separate ways. Not, however, before I wrote her number down on the back of one of my business cards. I still have that card. Like a desperate man who didn’t know the rules of the game, I actually called her the next day. And now here we are, eight years later, in the ninth month of a trip around the world together.

It’s funny how chance it can all be. Had I left just a minute earlier – as my friends Dave & Kate whom I was there with wanted to – we probably never would have met. I would never have known what true love was. What it was like to have a partner in every sense of the word. To be welcomed into a new family, to see how wonderful life can be, and to be shown how to be a better person. I guess it would have just been Wandering Walker instead of Wandering Walkers.