A Good Boss.

Chan and I yesterday morning were having one of those conversations about scheduling that seem to constitute about 40% of the conversation of married couples, or at least this married couple, when he mentioned in passing the name of a colleague he was having dinner with last night. I said, “Hm, I wonder if she’s related to the attorney I worked for in the late 90s?” (She had the same last name.) He did a quick Google search and found out that his colleague is my old boss’s daughter.

Through most of the 90s, I worked in big corporate law firms, at first as a temp proofreader on the graveyard shift. I taught myself to type on my downtime and moved up to word processing operator. Two attorneys, an associate and a partner I knew from working on their documents, who’d had a run of terrible secretaries, asked me if I’d take a full-time day shift position as their secretary. I was recruited out of the “typing pool.” I worked most closely with the partner, a litigator, typing letters, revising briefs, making travel arrangements and lunch reservations, submitting expenses, answering phones, and occasionally chatting with his personal shopper at Hermes. I was low maintenance and conscientious, he appreciated me. He was a great boss.

This is one of my favorite memories of him: I had gained and lost about 30 pounds, and I was trying to keep it off. Every day for lunch I brought 8 prunes and 10 saltines from home in Ziplock bags and ate them at my desk. One day he looked at the little stack of saltines on a paper towel next to my computer and said, “I can’t remember when I last had saltines. Those look good. Sometimes the simplest things are the best.” Which is true.

At that time, I was deep into Y’all, we’d started touring, we were busier than we had ever been or would be, always doing big promotion campaigns for shows, recordings, books, and of course rehearsing and performing. We were on a tear. When I took the secretary job I said to the two attorneys, “I’ll take the job, but I will never be available to stay late,” and they never asked me to. (I don’t know what it’s like now, but then it was just sort of assumed that if one of your attorneys handed you a task at 4:45 you stayed till it was finished, even if that meant staying until 8.) I worked for them for, I think, a little over a year, until Jay and I moved to Nashville in the fall of 1998.

At dinner last night, Chan told his colleague about this coincidence. She texted later to say that she’d asked her father if he remembered me. He texted back, “Do you mean Steve? He was the best secretary I ever had. I was sorry to lose him when he moved to Tennessee.” I was moved that he remembered me. It was almost 30 years ago, and just a day job, but in a life where so few tasks are straightforward, where feedback is always mixed and complicated, and nothing is ever certain to come to fruition, I was a very good legal secretary, and the confidence I gained from that carried through into my artist’s life, where so often the whole operation depends on one’s own irrational faith in the work to keep going.