Heard on the floor this morning, from three different people before the open, because the floor is a small town with six thousand people in it: Eddie Shepherd is engaged. To a girl who works at an options firm on LaSalle. Wedding next spring.

I'm fine. I am. I stood there with Marty's cards in my hand and thought about it for about ten seconds, and what I felt mostly was glad it isn't me. Then I felt bad for feeling glad. Then the bell rang and I didn't feel anything for four hours, which is the best thing about this job.

At the close Marty asked me, out of nowhere, "So what are you going to do with that Series 3?" I said I don't know. He said, "Think about it this summer. Don't think about it too long." Then he went and ate his turkey sandwich.

Everybody's talking about the screens.

The story goes like this. Last year in London, the big futures exchange there lost its biggest contract, a German government bond, to an all-computer exchange in Germany. Nobody shouting, nobody in a pit, just people at terminals clicking. By the end of the year the London pit for it was close to empty. The guys who traded there had to go learn computers or go home.

And here? Half the floor says it can't happen. A computer can't see fear in a guy's eyes. A computer can't tell you the big broker on the top step just got an order he doesn't like. The other half doesn't say anything, which is how you know they're worried. There's a kid at a firm upstairs, maybe twenty-two, who trades on a screen all day, and the old guys call him Nintendo, and he makes more than some of them.

Darlene says they said the same thing about the telephone, and here we all are. Then she told me she's retiring at the end of the year. Her knees. Twenty-five years standing on concrete steps. I said who's going to scare the new girls. She said, "You are."

Dad's last day. Thirty-two years.

He worked his last shift this afternoon and came home and took off the uniform and hung it in the hall closet, and then he stood there looking at it with the door open for a long time. Nobody said anything. Mom finally said, "Everett, close the door, you're letting the moths out," and he laughed.

Tonight was the party, at a banquet hall on the Southwest Side, about two hundred people. Cops he came on with in '67, guys he trained, guys who trained him, now old men with canes. A bagpiper. Too much beef and mostaccioli. Every one of his old partners got up and told a story, and half of them I can't repeat and the other half made my mom cry.

Then they asked the kids to say something. Paul said, "He taught me to change a tire and never to lie to him, and I only did one of those." Tricia cried before she started and never really started. I got up and said, "My dad told me, my first week on the trading floor, when a guy yelled at me in front of everybody: did you cry? Did you fix it? Then it's done. Tomorrow you walk past him and say good morning." And I said, "Dad, it's done. Tomorrow you get to sleep in."

He didn't cry. He did go outside for a minute. You need a minute between the noise and the house.

PASSED.

Took the Series 3 this morning on a computer at a testing center out in the suburbs, a little room with partitions and a lady at the front watching you on a TV screen like a bank robber. You need a seventy to pass. You find out right there when you finish. I got an 81. I sat and looked at the screen for a whole minute to make sure it wasn't going to change its mind.

Dad drove me out there and waited in the parking lot reading the paper the whole time, like a stakeout. When I came out he looked at my face and didn't even ask. He said, "Beef?" We went and got Italian beef, dipped, with hot peppers, and ate it in the car with the windows down even though it was forty degrees, because that's how we celebrate.

Marty, on the phone tonight: "Good. Now the real test starts." Darlene, on the phone tonight: "I knew it. Drinks on you Monday."

Studying every night. The book is fat and yellow and lives on the kitchen table now, between the salt and the napkins.

The test covers how futures and options work, hedging, margin, spreads, how the government regulates all of it, and about a thousand rules for how you're allowed to talk to customers. Some of it I know in my bones from the floor. Some of it, the options math, the regulation stuff, I've never seen in my life, even though it's been happening around me for two years. It's like living in a house for two years and then finding out there's a basement.

My mom makes flash cards. She doesn't understand any of it but she reads them off like a game show host. "What is a bull spread?" Dad tried to help once and asked if a short hedge is what you do with a lawn mower. Then he went and watched TV.

FLOOR WORD: basis. The difference between what a farmer gets for his beans at the elevator in his town today and what beans are trading for in the pit. Every farmer in Illinois knows his basis better than his kids' birthdays.

Happy New Year, two weeks late. We got buried. The New Year's storm dropped about twenty inches on the city, and Dad says it's the second-biggest snow he's seen since he became a cop, and the biggest one was his first year, '67. He and Paul and I shoveled the walk, the neighbor's walk, the walk of the lady across the street whose son never comes, and Dad's old squad car partner's walk, all before noon on New Year's Day. My arms still hurt.

Jordan retired again on Wednesday. For real this time, everybody says. The floor took it personally.

And Marty, at the close on Friday: "You should take the Series 3." That's the national exam you have to pass to be registered to deal with customers in the futures business. You can't really move up without it. I said, "When?" He said, "Before your dad retires. Give him something to brag about at the party." So I bought the study book yesterday. The test is in March.