The pronoun for the afternoon is “We” not “I”, because
without each and every one of you there is no me. We have worked side by side
these years, field hands in the world of ideas: matching books and readers (as
Joyce says). If I was any good at this at all, it was because you were my
examples.
I’m sure that the psychologists would have a “field day”
with this, but the only goal I really had as a young man was to have a lot of
friends. Working for Harper in the Rocky Mountains
has helped me fulfill that young man’s objective to the utmost. All of you are
the makers of my dream, and you will remain in my memories for the years I have
left. The times I’ve had with so many of you are what one of my buyers Ruth
Block at St Olaf’s used to refer to as “way too much fun”. I thank every one of
you for any success that I have enjoyed in my career here.
As I look back, I see my work life in cinematic terms, a
collage of plane flights and car rides, catalogues, order forms and lap tops,
shipments and arrangements, hopes and attitudes, many amazing reads, (some
penned by authors here today), and an occasional cocktail, well maybe a
frequent cocktail when those were my MO, and a million laughs, a gathering of
stories.
The beauty of reflection was evidenced last night at dinner
with the Hopkins and Betsy and Ann from King’s English, and why is it that
talking about the difficult interactions is so much funnier than talking about
the easy ones? Who knows? Mysteries remain unsolved.
For today, what I humbly understand is that with you and
extraordinary good fortune, the script gets changed and we don’t arrive at this
moment, and I am deeply grateful for this moment, and I am thankful to have discovered
a modicum of humility, and somehow that
awareness that the world is fragile and finite, and it makes it feel to me like
it’s time for punctuation, and as WE move on from here, as Pooh said to Tigger,
“I am in you and you are in me.”
When I started in the business, my previous employer was the
Yonkers Board of Education, where I passed a year as an entertaining, yet not
very engaged eighth grade teacher. It’s pretty tough to have an orderly
classroom if the teacher has what we now refer to as ADD. At age twenty-four, I
didn’t have the ability to sit in a classroom and focus on individual and
collective goals for one hundred and twenty students, when there was a big
world outside that needed to become my oyster. As luck would have it, my cousin
Jonathan Dolger, who at the time was an editor at Harper, was best friends with
the new Sales Director, Bob Gales, and Bob hired me with no book experience to
cover six southern states with no major accounts. It got me out of
The City, which at that point in time was a good thing for both me and The
City, and more importantly it was the perfect indulgence for my ADD, in that I
had one hundred and ten customers and thousands of publications, to not focus
on very well. A variation of that broad schematic has lasted thirty plus years,
and has been the perfect indulgence for me to skip across the stream of
publishing and never quite sink.
On a good day this is an absolutely charmed existence, the
intersection of ideas an personalities, and I honestly can say that if I’ve
passed one minute of the 30 plus “bored”, then my own blood sugar was the
culprit, certainly not the business that we’re in. There is a flip side, of
course, and that shadow side for me is inexplicable, in that the limitless
permutations become something of a tread mill, and having been born under a
self- critical star, there is a sense that I could have done better; that there
is work undone, opportunities missed, and it’s always time to move on.
So for me, in a
latter year, I start anew, and look back at the more narrow focus, that I can
be a better husband, father, grandpa (and judging from what I see of the next
generation, the parents are going to need all the help they can get), focus on
a few subjects and giving back to the world in which I’ve been so damned lucky,
on my own schedule for a little while. I thank HarperCollins for the
opportunity to do so, and the association of these years, in which I’ve had the
opportunity to work for a reputable, challenging, and humane company.
It is my sincere hope that this is no goodbye, but a “so
long” and that I will see all my friends here again, and often. You are in my
thoughts and memories, thoughts which frequently give me an opportunity to
chuckle. I wish you all peace, joy, and prosperity in the years ahead. I hope
when you think of me, it’s about good times, as are my memories of you.