After I quit volunteering for the union, I found myself spending afternoons weeping through TV screenings of Norma Rae. I missed the commitments I had spent years building. To stand up in the textile factory, to raise the ragged placard with the word UNION on it. To stand up to everyone around you. To spend nights and weekends in a kind of exhausted frenzy, making hundreds of phone calls, digging deep into the news archives for a bit of telling data that would help you screw the bosses, driving to one home after another, one workplace after another, pleading with workers, pleading with everyone you knew but, in truth, with yourself, that there was nothing more important, that your work, that laundry and cooking, would all have to wait for this higher cause . . . was there anything greater? I missed it like a limb.