Most personal home pages, I have noticed, begin with an exclamation point. This one will not. I have spent fourteen years removing exclamation points from other people's sentences, and I do not intend to start handing them out on my own behalf.

My name is Philip Crane. I am thirty-six years old. I was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the second of three children, which is to say I was neither the first nor the baby, and I have occupied roughly that position ever since. I was not gifted, nor was I troubled. My report cards said I was "a pleasure to have in class," which is what teachers write when they cannot quite recall your face.

I have never broken a bone, won a raffle, or been mistaken for anyone famous. I was once mistaken for a man named Gary, at a wedding, by several people, and I answered to it for most of the evening because correcting them seemed like more of an imposition. That is the most dramatic thing that has ever happened to me, and I have told it to you in the first section, which should tell you something about the sections to come.

My mother had hoped for a doctor. When that became untenable, she hoped for a lawyer, and then, lowering her sights with visible effort, for an accountant. I am a copy editor at a monthly trade magazine for the commercial laundry industry, a publication whose readers are loyal, specific, and few. She tells her friends that I am "in publishing," which is true in the sense that a man who changes the oil is "in automobiles."

She telephones on Sunday evenings to ask whether anything has happened. I tell her no. There follows a pause of a length and quality I have come to think of as punctuation: longer than a comma, not quite a period. A semicolon, I suppose; something is coming, and it is usually my cousin Douglas's promotion.

I collect stamps, which is the hobby a man chooses once he has made peace with being unremarkable at work and would like to extend the arrangement to his weekends. My specialty is the ordinary United States stamps of the 1960s and 1970s, the definitives: small, patient portraits in muted colors, printed by the hundred million to carry gas bills. No one else wants them. I find this restful.

I do not own an Inverted Jenny. One sheet of one hundred was printed in 1918 with the airplane upside down, and a single one is now worth considerably more than everything I own. The Inverted Jenny is what a mistake becomes when enough time passes and enough people agree to find it charming. I think about this more than is healthy for a copy editor.

I share a one-bedroom apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, with a gray cat named Fowler, after the author of Modern English Usage, whom he resembles in being both fastidious and unforgiving. Fowler regards me with the settled contempt of a senior editor reading a manuscript he has been paid to finish. He sits on the galleys I bring home. He does not sit on me. When I speak to him he closes his eyes slowly, which I am told is, in cats, a sign of affection. I have chosen to believe it.

I believe in the serial comma, the small mark before the final "and" in a list, sometimes called the Oxford comma after the university press that insists upon it. My magazine follows Associated Press style, which does not. Each month I remove forty or fifty of them, cleanly and as instructed, and each one feels like a small act of disloyalty to a friend.

The customary argument involves a book dedication that reads "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God." I will not make that argument here. I will say only that on this page, where I am editor, publisher, and sole contributor, the commas stay.

An essay about nothing ought, by rights, to end with nothing, and I had meant to stop at the commas. But a good editor always asks what a piece is withholding, and so, reluctantly, here it is.

I am happy.

Not in the manner of the people in long-distance commercials, who are happy at a volume. I mean it in the quiet, unphotographable way. I like my work. I like the 7 train at eight in the morning, the newspapers folded into long thin columns. I like Sunday afternoons with a pair of stamp tongs, a stack of glassine envelopes, and a cat who despises me in a steady and dependable manner. I like knowing exactly where every comma in a sentence belongs, even on the days I am not permitted to put it there.

My mother would say this is not news. She is, as usual, right about the form and wrong about the substance. It is the one remarkable thing I know about myself, and I have buried it in the last section, where the careful reader will find it.