Hey folks, Creed here.

As many of you know, each week I write and record a note for cafe insiders.

This week's note was an especially personal reflection, and I wanted to share it with

listeners of Stay Tuned.

I hope you enjoy it.

Dear listener, the summer of 88 was a hot one.

But maybe I remembered hotter than it was, because back then there was no air conditioning

on the subway.

In those months, the New York City subway was the final leg of my morning commute to

an unpaid state government internship with the office of the ombudsman, where I did

constituent work.

I had just finished my sophomore year of college, and living in the city was out of the question.

So I lived at home in Eaton Town, New Jersey with my parents.

Every morning, my mother would drive me to the little silver train station, where I would

join the hoards of commuters for the hour long trek to Penn station in Manhattan.

Then I took the sweaty subway to a downtown government office building.

Kindles were decades in the future.

So if you wanted to read a big fat book, you had to lug it around.

Just before my internship, I found a big fat book I wanted to read, so I lugged it onto

the train each day in my Jans Ford backpack.

The book was called Robert Kennedy at his Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

It ran to 983 pages, 1163 pages, if you counted the notes and index.

...