No Pride In This Dust

On a Greyhound speeding through a dark, icy night toward Chicago, I return to old memories of packing lunch bags and pulling on greasy overalls each morning before rushing desperately to beat the factory time clock—months and months of this drudgery my reward for temporarily dropping out of a Chicago high school during the mid-1950s. Now I head once more toward that muscular city on the lake, to struggle again with time clocks and lunch bags—this time driven not by necessity but curiosity...