Sometime in the mid-1980s Gloria Lubkin, the editor of Physics Today, invited me to contribute to a new column of opinion called Reference Frame. Earlier that decade I had published two articles in Physics Today. The first described my successful effort to make the ridiculous word “boojum” an internationally accepted scientific term. The second gave a very elementary way of thinking about Bell's Theorem and its implications for our understanding of quantum mechanics. These apparently suggested to Gloria that I'd make a good columnist.

I wasn't so sure. Having to produce something clever and entertaining at regular intervals was not my style. On the occasions when I'd managed to do it, it seemed like a small miracle, unlikely ever to happen again. So while I didn't say no, I kept stalling. A couple of years went by.

Then one day I discovered that Physical Review Letters, the world's most important physics journal, was doing something quite ridiculous that seemed to have escaped the attention of all the physicists I told about it. The absurd policy and the fact that nobody seemed to have noticed it made a good story. Another miracle. I sent the story (Chapter 1) to Gloria and became a columnist, joining a group of Reference Frame writers that included Phil Anderson, David Gross, Leo Kadanoff, Dan Kleppner, Jim Langer, and Frank Wilczek.

After that Gloria would phone every few months requesting more miracles. Somehow she managed to induce them. I came to regard her as my Muse. For 21 years she extracted essays I didn't know were in me. She criticized first drafts and negotiated final versions. As some of these essays reveal, my relations with editors have often been tense, but working with Gloria was always a pleasure. She knew exactly how to do her job, and she knew how to get me to do mine.

In 2009 Gloria Lubkin retired from Physics Today and the Reference Frame columns came to an end. I found to my surprise that I had produced thirty of them—one every eight issues. Not all were miracles, but surprisingly many were. As I traveled around the world of physics after 1988, giving talks at universities and conferences, I discovered that I was becoming better known for my columns than for my technical scientific papers or textbooks.