ABSTRACT
When I was in sixth grade, the teacher asked me if I would like to do some clerical work for a man who lived across from the school. I don’t know whether she picked me because she thought I was neat and reliable or she perceived that money was short in our family—which would have been fairly rare in that solid middle-class neighborhood. I went to the man’s house, and he gave me a small notebook in which to draw lines on each page, perhaps for purposes of keeping a budget.
