The night the highway patrol officer picked Andy and me up on I-90 about halfway between Chicago and Madison, I was a 21-year old graduate student who had never worked for a living. I'd had part time jobs-serving food, washing test tubes, typing index entries for a bibliography-but I thought of those as scaffolding, necessary for support but irrelevant to my underlying purpose.

It was 1970 and the national guard had just shot and killed four students at Kent State. At the University of Wisconsin, where I was doing my graduate work, Vietnam war protesters had turned State Street into a corridor of shattered glass and boarded up windows. An organization of radicals who painted their faces and embraced the teachings of Ho Chi Minh had bombed a university building. The tear gas that stung my eyes and blurred my vision as I walked between classes also shaped my view of life beyond academia: I equated earning a living with selling out.

Such revolutionary sentiments didn't stop me from enjoying life's finer things. When my friend, Andy, who lived downstairs in my rooming house, invited me to an opera and dinner in Chicago, I jumped at the chance. I don't remember now what opera we saw or what I had for dinner. I do remember how cold it was and how easily, during the three hour drive into the city, the Wisconsin winter found its way inside Andy's ancient Rambler. And I do remember, when the Rambler broke down on the way back, how quickly what had seemed like the road home when we were moving became the middle of nowhere when we were standing still. For someone who associated uniforms with the enemy, I was disconcertingly delighted at the appearance of a highway patrol vehicle cruising the freeway on the other side of the median. Its driver spotted our blinking lights, spun a u-turn, and came to our rescue.

He was a big man and the way he didn't hurry made him seem like a patient and thorough one. I watched him pull up behind us, fiddle with something on the dashboard, climb out of his car, glance backward down the freeway, and stroll toward the Rambler, his leather jacket and boots reflecting the pale moonlight. His hat, with its wide brim and round top, looked like the one Sky King wore in his TV series called Mountie of the Canadian West.

"Car trouble?" he asked, resting his hands on the lower edge of the window and leaning down to look inside. When Andy explained our situation, the highway patrol officer offered to drive us to the nearest town where we could arrange to have the Rambler towed to a service station.