The Big Picture and the Closeup

Trust me, you do not want to work in or help create such an workplace. Despite the great prestige and the nominally higher pay that shops like that offer you, you will be much happier if you can be somewhere where you and everyone involved can feel the rubber meet the road. If you are in a firm, you want everyone to share in the ups and downs, to have a fair financial stake and a recognition and a say.

The summer after my graduation was perfect. I wasn’t working; couldn’t find any. So I kept my own hours — noon to 3 a.m., working on the Great American High School Novel. Only problem: I really had nothing to say about high school. But I think my inchoate hope was that by making sense of it all through fiction, I could still get the girl to love me.

Those who were paying any kind of attention to Sgt. Pepper on that hot afternoon knew that they’d have to pay a lot more attention, later on, that we’d all have to listen to it several times to get out of it a reasonable helping of what the album had to offer. But hey, we had the time. That was the beauty of the moment for us. We had the time.