Here's to a magical ski season.

It is somewhat a religious experience to take your first and last run of the season alone reflecting on your inner thoughts and private feelings. Yesterday I found myself at the top of Mount Tecumseh, aka Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, about to push off for my first run of the 2010-11 ski season. Not having met up with my friends, I would just take a run alone and find them later. That's when it occurred to me that a solo run would be the best start to my season. And so with a few thoughts in my brain and thanksgiving in my heart, I thought about two skiers whose time on the hill was cut too short...my brother who took me skiing when I was a teenager and basically set me on the course of lifelong skiing and Mitch Kaplan, a fellow ski writer and gracious intellect who was the best writer I ever knew personally. Dedicating this first run to them, I pushed off into perfectly whipped snow with no one before me, only the winter landscape. As I turned hard to the left and dipped down onto the flat of Oblivion, my eyes caught two perfect prisms of light overhead side by side. Not rainbows but two parallel matching lines of perfect color spectrum just above in the blue sky where a few white clouds danced. Ahh, of course, I thought, they knew and I knew. Here's to them, here's to me and here's to my ski season that is ahead. To quote Tiny Tim, "God Bless us everyone."  Here's to the magic in your life too wherever you find it.