003 – My offices

I’ve had my offices in the same building for twenty years.  Don’t ask me why, it just happened that way.  The building is squeezed in next to some big old department stores, not far from the red-light district, and surrounded by the downtown building boom.  It’s amazing what happens when yuppie urban planners and real estate developers turn old cobblestone streets into a mall.  I’m on the fourth floor in a corner office.  Really sort of nice once you’re inside.  Cool in color, awake to the street below, oriental rugs, a framed print of the Constitution given to me as a Christmas gift by my young partner in crime, an infrared photo of Cape Cod from space, a lithograph of the port of Boston in the eighteen hundreds, the picture of F.D.R. that adorned the vestibule to my parent’s apartment in Newark.

When I got out of law-school I was forty years old and not such a desirable commodity.  I’d worked as a hospital administrator for years and there were simply no law jobs for forty year old freshmen lawyers with a background in hospital administration.  So when I was finally offered a position paying less than half of what I made at the hospital I took it and worked for nine months with an in-house insurance defense outfit.  I felt I really had no choice.  And I learned a lot.  That firm was a little like being in a MASH army field hospital.  There were lots of cases needing attention, thousands of cases, with more coming in all the time.  American Field Insurance Group represented mostly taxi companies.  The insurance side of the company had actually been established fifty years ago when the immigrant founder of the taxi companies got tired of paying someone else for his mandatory auto insurance premiums.  So he started his own insurance company.  And then he bought garages and parking lots and real estate and before you knew it he was ninety years old, many times over a millionaire, and the proud possessor of the first nickel he had ever earned or stolen.