I looked up from my computer, stunned. “You booked us to leave three days after I retire??”
Never shy about taking action, Bill had set our three-month
world tour to begin a weekend away from my last day of working life, after 45
years on the job.
I thought at first it must be a mistake. “Oopsie, I did that?” he’d say. Now, I’m sure he did it on purpose, and
with wisdom. Like throwing a kid off the
dock in the firm belief that it will swim.
Why dilly-dally?
Why should this unsettle me?
I’ve been in college textbook publishing since 1970,
two-thirds of my life ago. This is long enough to have attended outlandishly
costly dinners, schmoozing tipsily with authors and senior editors in Chicago,
Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, Miami. Picture
Mad Men, just a couple years
later. These were the good old days
before textbooks were dying, when one could still smoke in one’s office, order plural
bottles of costly wine for the table, wax wildly creative, put on a
sound-and-light show to present a new book at a sales conference. "We
shall be both dog and pony."
