Some stories start with a thunderclap, or a bolt of lightning that lights up the sky. This one started with a burrito.

To be precise, a Baja Fresh burrito, on a sun-soaked afternoon in Southern California. My brother Ken and I were in our Dodgers caps and Ray Bans pitching screenplay ideas to each other – pretty much a requirement if you want to live in Southern California.

You know the kind of conversation — half dream, half daylight, fueled by chips and Diet Coke, where for a little while, anything seems possible.

That’s when The Fork first showed up.

Now, when I say “The Fork,” I don’t mean an actual utensil that waltzed onto the table and demanded a speaking role. No, The Fork was the idea — a half-formed notion about a powerful, but anonymous food critic known only as The Fork, who could break any restaurant with a withering review. But with those same fingers, he could write a positive review that would ensure even a fledgling restaurant could count on a six-month backlog of reservations the next day. His calling card? A golden fork left on the table of thumbs up restaurant, a plastic fork for a thumbs down experience.

Ken and I tossed the idea back and forth, this strange, funny little story we weren’t quite sure what to do with. So we moved onto the next idea on our spreadsheet of ideas.

And there The Fork sat.

For years.

Now, I’d love to tell you that during those years, we were busy building a glittering career as playwrights, or that Spielberg called and said, “Hey fellas, about that Fork idea…”, but life had other plans, so this one got tucked away gathering virtual dust.

Every now and then, one of us would say, “Hey, what about that Fork idea?” and the other would nod, “Yeah, we should do something with that.” And then we’d go back to our lives, as people do — day job, family, mowing the lawn, moving to a different state – that sort of thing.

But here’s the thing I’ve learned about ideas from this era of The Fork’s journey:

• Good ideas don’t always show up fully formed. Sometimes they’re just a funny thought over lunch.
• It’s okay to set something aside. Some ideas need time to ripen — like a tomato on the windowsill (or that banana you swore you’d eat, but now it has become brown gooeyness for your wife’s amazing banana bread).
• Dreams have a long shelf life — and they have a way of finding you again when the time is right.
• Don’t toss that spreadsheet of ideas out just yet. It is good to not just dive headfirst into every idea you can think of. Because many of us are in Life’s Act III, there isn’t time to pursue all projects. Force ourselves to consider and weigh each project, then dive headfirst and make the chosen one happen.
• Sometimes, they wait for you. Until you’re ready for them. Not all the time. Can’t count the number of times it has felt like the idea got tired of waiting on me and flitted on to someone else and is now playing at the local Cineplex.

But The Fork kindly chose to wait and find its way back to us — and that’s a story for the next chapter.

Next time: “The Midnight Deadline That Snuck Up at 8 PM — and How Panic Can Be a Great Motivator.”