When I left residence in graduate school at the University of Chicago and came to live in Boston in 1966, I was welcomed into a community of sociologists at Brandeis University to whom I have been ever grateful. Egon Bittner sat at the centre of this world, bequeathing to me whatever intellectual accomplishment or sense there exists in my work over these years. This acknowledgement is insuffi‐ cient, however, to convey what our relationship became or what Egon made of me. Certainly, I would never have switched fields and identity (a word I do not deploy easily because it obscures more than it conveys) to become a sociologist, without his mentoring and guidance. Ever since I appeared in one of his classes, invited by his student Claire Lang whom I had just met and with whom I bonded in love of Egon, he became my teacher, my friend, an inspiration, and eventually a colleague. Above all else, he showed me a way of understanding; he opened my eyes and mind to the tacit features of social action, about which I had an inkling when I was dissatisfied with the training I was receiving in political science but which I did not know how to access or conceptualise until he took me under his wing. I have been immersed in this activity ever since. It has been a very good life and I owe much of the passion for the work to him. I never formally registered for classes at Brandeis, I simply poached from the pool of exciting sociology and provocative students that were there in the late Sixties and Seventies. I attended classes and seminars, reading the materials for Egon’s courses on ethnomethodology, the sociology of law, social theory, crime and policing, as well as Irv Zola’s classes on deviance and medical sociology. I gathered in as much as I could. I would go to Egon’s office, hounding him with questions. He was so generous and so kind, yet often abstruse. It was challenging. I was often lost but thought of little else than our conversations. It would take me weeks to decipher a comment, and I know that I missed most of the implications. But, it occupied and transformed me completely. At the end of the first year, I wrote a dissertation proposal for a project on the legal enforcement of morals and went off with it to the University of Chicago, where I was still formally ABD, to seek advice from my committee members in the Political Science Department and the Law School. I had never actually been