Shall I say a line from a song changed my life? It’s sentimental but true. Important things rarely touch me; the news, like an old wind, rushes by. Small things, signs, gestures point the way for me — in 1971, it was a song, reminding me that making a living and making a life aren’t separate, though we pretend otherwise.
I led two lives that year, different as night and day. From midnight until dawn, when the sun slanted across my desk through dusty blinds, I was a copy editor for the Long Island Press. I didn’t like the job, or most of the people there — the angle of their judgments, the heavy air of their lives; nor did I like the Press, which I’d worked for previously — vowing, when I’d quit, never to return. How strange to be back; how strange to be back just for the money.
