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Johnny's Diner was the hot new place in Newton Centre, the little commercial cluster between Rolly's house and mine. It was just about a year old, but it was decked out like a 1950s soda fountain and storefront diner, only nicer. John Furst, the owner, had designed it like the diner everyone wished they had had in some storybook youth, but lighter and hipper and better equipped than the real thing had been. Like the house we wished our grandparents had lived in. Like memory, only better.

It was breakfast time and the place was hopping. People paid handsomely for their nifty nostalgia trip at Johnny's. But the atmosphere was so evocative and pleasing that they paid happily, the same way they paid happily through the nose at Starbuck's.

Rolly was already there, reading Investor's Business Daily. I had never heard of it before we started hanging out. I wouldn't have dreamed of picking it up at a newsstand. Are you kidding me? But he read it religiously, and I was starting to grab his old copies.

I was just back from a reporting trip through Paris and Zurich and down to Belgrade. It had been grim. We sat in the diner, and I told him a little of what I had seen and heard -- of bombed-out Vukovar, of ghoulish skinhead militiamen along the Danube, of neighbors ax-murdering neighbors and stakes driven through familiar foreheads in revenge. Horrible stuff.

"Thank you for sharing that," said Rolly, his eggs and home fries arriving. The place was packed. Who were all these people, lounging over eggs and lox and coffee on a bright workday morning? And who was I to drag that other reality in here? Rolly's mind was somewhere else.

"Tom, I'd like you to have a five percent stake in BuildingBlocks," he said, changing the subject.

Excerpted from THE LEAP, A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND MADNESS IN THE INTERNET GOLD RUSH, by Tom Ashbrook. Reprinted by permission of the publisher Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

"For what?" I asked.

"For what you've contributed already and for what I hope you contribute in the future," said Rolly, putting on his mildly facetious businessman's voice. But this, of course, was serious. "In what relationship? In what role?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "We'll have to work that out."

And in our next version of the business plan -- before I had really decided anything, before Danielle had more than half mumbled a warning in the night -- there I was, in the magic realm beyond the Stars Wars page, a founding partner in the business.

This was getting to be a lot of realities to handle all at once.