With everything that’s so awful in our lives right now (and we needn’t rehearse it all), I’m going to revive this blog and try to make it more fun; I seem to have gotten away from that.
So tonight I’m going to talk about a phrase that Nancy and I have shared, like all married couples do, I suppose, that ended up meaning more than they should have.
The first, more in future blogs:
When I graduated from law school, I thought I was joining a firm that would give me copious corporate work—transactions, corporate governance, oh, what did I know? There were maybe three or four full-time corporate lawyers, and the rest who did that work filled in the void with real estate, wills, bankruptcy, and the ever-present litigation. Wish I’d known that when I joined.
So I ended up doing a lot of courthouse-related work that didn’t have me going to court, which was just fine with me. Young lawyers who want to go to court are clearly deranged; no one should want to do that until they’re at least 40 and have assisted trying numerous cases.
I was assigned to work on a slip-and-fall case. The slipping and falling and injuring had occurred at a big box store like Walmart, though I don’t think there were Walmarts in those days. Maybe a K-Mart.
Who knows what the facts of that case were, and for all I know it was settled early. I don’t even know what I was supposed to do on the case.
Truly, in all honesty, there couldn’t have been a less interesting, important, or noteworthy case ever. The practice of law is like that. In law school, my prof in employment discrimination, a mild and sweet man, suddenly burst out wildly one day and said loudly, “Most of what you’re going to do in practice is just crap.” This alarmed the class; even the 3L’s in the back row put down their newspapers.
In any event, I was perusing the file, taking my time. In all honesty, this firm wasn’t all that busy, and I didn’t have a lot to do. I’d haunt certain nicer partners asking for more work. When I finished with whatever I had to do on this file, I probably didn’t have anything else to do.
Let me digress yet again, and not for the last time: in my entire law career, I never was all that busy. There are lawyers who, I’m sure, have way too much to do, like Nancy. She was always way too busy. There was reportedly a lawyer in Winston-Salem who billed over 3000 hours one year. That is pretty much physically impossible, unless you have a lot of luck and this sort of ethics, a particular fantasy that a couple of us giggled about:
You have a deposition to take in Los Angeles. You board a flight in Winston-Salem and work the whole time, five hours. You bill that time to Client A. Then you also bill five hours of travel time to Client B, for whom you’re taking the deposition. This is clearly unethical. That’s ten hours before you even get off of the plane. And it’s three hours earlier there! Then you take the deposition, etc etc. You can bill twenty hours a day working like that! Sadly, I never had to take a deposition in LA. Anyway, that would be wrong. Who knows what that guy was actually doing. It says a lot about some lawyers’ ego and judgment that they can say that they billed 3000 with a straight face and not expect a grievance to be filed with the Bar.
Back to the file I was idly perusing, hoping it might take all day. I came upon any number of statements by people who had or might have witnessed the slip and fall.
And there it was, what my colleagues back in the literary world might call a “found poem”, that is, something poetic that turns up in real life. A cashier or someone who worked in the store said that, “We were all off to one side looking at pictures of Debby’s babby when this happened.”
Oh, thank you! A statement to lift me out of my everyday drudgery! Something to treasure. Of course you weren’t actually doing your jobs, which might have included wiping up the wet spot upon which the plaintiff slipped and fell. You were all gathered over off at the side looking at pictures of some random, never-again-to-be-important baby. And she was “Debby’s babby”!
But because you were, there are no witnesses to this misprision. Miss Plaintiff may as well as been rooting through several cash registers before sneaking out the door and then, oops, falling on your wet floor.
Which raises another old memory. At Auburn University, my father indulged his love of unfortunates who came his way as a professor of vocational rehabilitation. He had a wide-ranging career; at West Virginia University, he trained students who wanted to be guidance counselors. That meant that, aged 6, I had to take endless intelligence tests to give the students practice in administering them. I got a quarter for each test. I think in the end my IQ score suffered due to boredom. Or maybe I’m just not all that bright, a realization that is settling in on me like a misty, foreboding cloud.
In any event, one of his…patients?...at Auburn was a fellow who wandered the streets, and, one day, purloined a shopping cart from a grocery store, entered a bank, and emptied the registers while everyone was no doubt suffering through some sort of meeting in a conference room. I am not making this up, as Dave Barry would say. They found him striding down the street with his over-laden shopping cart. It is not clear whether the bank recovered all of their funds. My father wasn’t blamed, anyway. Dad loved his work, loved these characters, and, like a lot of football coaches, died of heart trouble not long after he retired.
Oh, sorry. Debby’s babby. Ever since, when some unfortunate presents a photograph of his or her newish baby to Nancy and me, we glanced at each other, knowing that the other is thinking of Debby’s babby. Are you sitting down? Debby’s babby must be in his/her mid-30’s by now.
The lawyer in charge of the case, Clint, was a former University of North Carolina defensive lineman, a Marine who’d been in Vietnam, and a dedicated trial lawyer. He kept a couple of flags in the corner, one a U.S. flag, and the other probably some Marine thing. This behavior was not unknown at my first firm. He was someone to be careful not to let your guard down around; admit to a vulnerability, and he would be sure to put the knife in ever after. Annoying, and mean-spirited in a boys-in-the-locker-room sort of way.
About six of us lawyers were talking one day at lunch at a barbeque joint, and someone said, what would you do if you got a million dollars? Clint said he’d take a trip around the world and then go back to trying cases because he loved it so much, which was remarkably different from everyone else who would have just fucking quit.
Later, after Nancy and I were safely in Delaware, he and my mentor, Joe Moss, left my first firm and started their own. One day in court, the judge said, OK, this case is set for trial on such and such a date. Clint stood up and said, OK, but you’ll have to try it without me, because I won’t be there, and walked out. This from the putative millionaire who’d take a trip around the world and then by golly go back to trying cases.
His partner Joe didn’t learn of it till later from someone who’d been in court when it happened. Joe went to Clint’s house and found him wheeling madly on his exercise bicycle.
“Clint, I’m your partner. When were you going to tell me?” Joe asked.
“Well, I haven’t told my wife yet,” said the industrious Clint.
Then he went back to school and became a nurse known as Squishy because he was so sweet to the patients.
The point of this post is what Jerry Seinfeld said: No, life isn’t too short. It’s too long.
So much happens. Debby’s babby seems so so very long ago. My father died not long after he quit doing what he loved. Clint may still be inserting IV’s after being a defensive back, a Marine in Vietnam, and a trial lawyer. Joe’s dead. All of this just happened in my very own lifetime. It’s bewildering.
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