News Summary

• As adolescents, my wife and I both had summer jobs.
• In Iowa, she pushed a cart around the library, reshelving books.
• In Oregon, I pushed a mail cart through the antiseptic-laced hallways of the hospital where my mother worked.
• I also collated and stapled thick packets of photocopies by hand and alphabetized hundreds of files.
• As I watched the clock's slow-moving minute hand tick toward my lunch break, it dawned on me that the surest path away from this sort of tedious, repetitive work was getting into college.