He telephoned Julia (she had likely come to the city and, between Saks and Bergdorf's, had stopped up for a moment), though Benjamin couldn't imagine what his wife might be thanking him for. "Not me," said his wife, and Benjamin detected a ring of suspicion in her voice. "Nor I," said Norma, his secretary. Then Norma placed the cap squarely onto his head and took a step back, studying him as though he were a piece of art hung in a gallery. "But it's definitely you. I mean, with it on you're so much...younger. Boy-like even, if you know what I mean. I don't know...somehow fresh. That's it. That's the word for it. Fresh."

And Benjamin did feel fresh, did feel younger. No sooner had he placed the cap on his head than an unmistakable lightness, a confident nonchalance washed over him. He was Benjamin Miller at twenty-two again, half of what had once been a marijuana joint dangling from his hand. And alone in his office, the magical cap on head, the now forty-five year old Benjamin would push back his chair, place his feet on desk, and gaze up to the brim's orange underside. And in those late afternoon moments, the office door closed and latched, Benjamin Miller would became younger still, now a schoolboy of twelve, dawdling away a rainy afternoon on the front porch of his parents' home. Gazing up at the roof's overhang, as he jotted those clever phrases, those turns of a word, which had always come to him so quickly, so naturally. This finessing of language which, ten years later, would result in his being so well paid, creating classic advertisements for radio and TV, print ads for magazines.

But that was then: the Benjamin Miller in his twenties, then thirties. Today, Benjamin's value to Miller & Devine was no longer this artistry. Today he was the celebrity partner, the wooer of major new clients, the partner who courted young copywriters and artists away from competing agencies. The partner who authorized budgets. Administered company policy, insurance, and profit-sharing plans. "I couldn't come up with an ad campaign if my life depended on it," he would say, always with that touch of sadness he hoped would prompt his listener to challenge the statement—though none ever did. But on the very afternoon he discovered the cap, its brim pulled down to just above the bridge of his nose, Benjamin began running through his most celebrated campaigns (looking back instead of forward something he'd been doing more with each passing year). But that day, the Day of the Cap, instead of mourning the talented young man he'd once been, Benjamin assured himself, "And I could do it again."

There had been his radio campaign for Kodak film processing. Film processing advertised on the radio? Industry people had thought him insane. But in Benjamin's script a father returning home hears squeals of delight from inside his house, as his children go through the Kodak-processed photos of their recent visit to Disneyland. Benjamin's award-winning tagline: "Photos so good you can hear them." Then came the print ad for the Porsche Targa convertible. An ad in which no car was shown: not a fender, no steering wheel or shift knob. No car, and no posing young woman "to die for." Simply the word TARGA in large red letters across the page, below which was a face. The face of a handsome young man, his brown hair fashionably long and blown by the wind straight back from his face. Ecstatic that face, a face at the very top of its game. A face—not coincidentally—very much like Benjamin's. And as he ran through this list of campaigns, as he tugged at the brim of his new cap, he was reminded of veteran baseball pitchers, veterans brought back up from the minors for one final shot at the big time.

And then, then came the afternoon, some three days following the cap's first appearance, that an uncommonly absent-minded Benjamin wore his gift outside his personal office, wore it as he strode down the long hallway and into a planning session with the agency's copywriters, the young off-the-wall dreamers with model trains in their offices and wind-up fire-engines on their shelves. And oh my, what a difference that cap seemed to make; the "creatives" claimed that, at last, at long last, Benjamin had allowed himself to actually hear, hear and appreciate, what they'd been saying for so long. More than that, they claimed Benjamin had actually contributed to their presentations, improved them, made them more "cutting edge." "Don't ever want to see you without that cap on your head," said Hugh Delaney, Art Director. "Don't leave home without it," chimed Bea Wallace, Account Executive assigned to Chicago's Dearborn Fashions.

Yes, of course, there was more than a bit of butt-kissing in these platitudes from his staff, these claims of a Benjamin Miller reborn. That said, it was also a fact that, since the cap's impromptu arrival, Miller & Devine had begun to sign the kind of accounts Benjamin had not thought possible. Velo Sports Gear. Harmona Jackets and Slacks. Products whose campaigns would require a significant shift away from the agency's more traditional approaches. The storyboards for these firms' ads were sexy, the language spare, their tone irreverent but somehow compelling. Scenes of handsome young men in athletic club locker rooms, in company boardrooms, on the white deck of a schooner; smart-talking, confident, attractive young men. The copy for these campaigns composed by someone who knew precisely the way that men think. More important, campaigns composed by someone who knew how men hoped to sound.

Early the following Monday, Benjamin's front doorbell chimed.