On Sunday afternoon, I met friends on the South Side where we enjoyed a really great meal at Gypsy Cafe and we saw a really bad play at the City Theater. (I don't like to be negative so I'm not going to tell you which play it was.)

After the play, I found myself with a few free hours to go to my second favorite place in the world. (I will write about my first favorite place at a later date.)

I went to the library in search of Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince. I wanted to read the sixth installment just one more time before the final and seventh book comes out on July 20.

Every other Harry Potter fan must have had the same idea. I couldn't find the Half-Blood Prince but I did find two books on cd in the non-fiction section. One, Night by Elie Wiesel, had been recommended to me by several friends. The second, Grayson, was a surprise. I flipped over the back and saw that it was a story about a girl swimming in the ocean, training for a swim, who encounters a baby gray whale.

I listened to the first cd on the way to work this morning. This is a magical, wonderful book that is written so beautifully. It is read by the author, Lynne Cox, and she is the only one who should read it. All doubts I may have harbored about the validity of her story vanished as I listened to Cox read about her encounter with a baby whale as she swam in the ocean off the California coast one early morning.