What made the job dispiriting was that you knew that very little of that red-pen teaching was apt to stick; if you reach the age of twenty-five or thirty without knowing how to spell (totally, not todilly), or capitalize in the proper places (White House, not white-house), or write a sentence containing both a noun and a verb, you’re probably never going to know.
-- Narrator (Introduction)

Importance: As a teacher, Jake shares the biggest frustration he had with teaching adult students, that if they had not learned the basics of writing by the time they took his class, they were not going to learn. Jake did not realize at this point that his life was about to get a good deal more complicated with Al asking him to step in and stop the assassination of Kennedy.

Maybe once he could have been something different, but one night his life turned on a...
-- Narrator (Introduction)