Writers, what was your best day at work?

Itโ€™s an old saw on the golf course: โ€œYour worst day golfing is better than your best day working.โ€

For me thatโ€™s never been true. My worst days golfing are bad, because I feel like Iโ€™m wasting my time, and my best days working are fantastic, because I feel at one with the universe.

But how many truly magical days have I spent working? In my experience, such days happen about once per decade.

Itโ€™s November 1995, and Iโ€™m lying on the sofa in Larry Raganโ€™s office at 3:00 a.m., trying to grab a few hours sleep before the graphic designer comes in to lay out the memorial issue Iโ€™ve been working on in the days since he died. Iโ€™m using all the skills my mentor taught me in order to honor him. As I try to sleep through the coffee buzz, I think of the line in a James Taylor song, โ€œNo one can tell me that Iโ€™m doing wrong today.โ€

On a wintry day in 2002, Iโ€™m riding in a rusty GMC Jimmy with a struggling stand-up comic Iโ€™m profiling for the Chicago Tribuneโ€™s Sunday Magazine. Weโ€™re headed for a two-night gig at a Holiday Inn in Eau Clair, Wis. Iโ€™m inhaling the fumes from his Nicorette gum, asking him how he prepares beef stroganoff on a hot plate, and thinking to myself that my competition is exactly no one, because Iโ€™m the only asshole in the world who thinks this is heaven.

In spring of this year, Iโ€™m holding my first โ€œspeechwriting jam sessionโ€ at a speechwriters conference in Phoenix. Iโ€™m playing great speeches and watching the eyes of the writers in the audience fill, as my own eyes fill, as I remember my dead writer dad, who agreed with all of us that communication and love are the same thing.

What was your best moment at work? Communicate it to us here, and now.

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