Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

On Being A Creative Refugee on the Underground Railroad or Would You Like a Side of Fries with That Baby Lawyer for Breakfast?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 3, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The seasons change in Southern California, but subtly. For the first two autumns I spent here, I was always waiting for the cold, wet, windy day that would announce winter had landed. That day always came in the South, a day when it became apparent that winter coats were now inevitable until late March or early April.

But to me autumn in Southern California has always consisted of the uneasy feeling that real winter is just around the corner. Except there is no corner, and real winter never arrives.

In my second autumn-waiting-for-winter here, my September baby began to settle into life. By late January, she slept more and cried less. From her infant seat, she began to look around at the world she found herself in, appraising its potential to entertain.

Less sleep deprived, I started to recover from months of living in survival mode. At last I began to feel separate from the child who had not allowed me to put her down since birth. And as I did, I began to reconnect the dots of the picture that was me. It was as if coming to California had severed my life into two halves. In half number one, I had been first a teacher and then a lawyer, married to a gentle man who wanted me to assume the responsibility of breadwinner. In half number two, I had married a man who ignored me, I had had a child, and I had lost myself. Why had I chosen this path? What had I been running from?

At least part of the answer could be traced to a deep winter day in February in Virginia. One morning I was sitting in my tiny cubicle of an office (it was exactly the same size as a secretary’s cubicle, but it had a door), watching the icy James River slide by my window and wondering if there would be black ice on the commute home. To say I was bored would be an understatement. I had never dreamed life in a big law firm could come to a crashing halt, day after day. But the litigation partner I worked for was busy on matters that didn’t require my help; and likewise the senior associate, who would be a partner within a year, hadn’t produced any interrogatories for me to draft or answer for more than a week.

Enter a Newly Minted Partner in the labor practice, looking for an associate to do a research project. I was “loaned” to the labor section and ushered into a conference room whose floor was white with paper. Every legal job begins with a story. And this was the story.

Newly Minted Partner, who was the rarity of all rarities at The Firm, a Female Newly Minted Partner, had just lost a Motion For Summary Judgment with her Mentor Male Senior Partner (to become partner at that firm, it was an advantage to have one of these). Now Summary Judgment is the worst legal insult possible. It means your lawsuit did not even get to first base. You filed something that didn’t state a claim a court could consider. Bad news. You’ve wasted everyone’s time. And money. And the client doesn’t think you are very smart.

Now The Firm, being one of the smartest and best anywhere, rarely fell victim to Summary Judgment. But, then, again, no one is perfect. Although The Firm did not see things that way.

At any rate, the paper on the floor was nearly every sex discrimination case ever decided by an appellate court. My job was to find the rest of the slippery little dears – if any more existed – and turn them into a memorandum that would be The Firm’s Secret Weapon to be used by Newly Minted Partner and Mentor Male Senior Partner when they went back to show the judge just how wrong he had been to dismiss their Age Discrimination Case. Or, in the alternative, my memo would be the basis for writing a new lawsuit that no one could throw out. Either way, The Firm had been embarrassed in front of one of its Highly Important Clients. And I was now thrown into the breach to repair the damage.

That project seized my imagination as few projects had done since becoming a Big Firm baby lawyer. Maybe it was the sight of a woman who had survived to join the Inner Sanctum that grabbed me. More likely it was just the intellectual challenge of making sense of all that paper. One of my professors in graduate school, when I’d been dreaming of being a professor myself one day, had explained we are biologically driven to create order out of chaos. So perhaps my creative juices were happy to be alive and well again.

I was given two weeks to produce The Firm’s Secret Weapon, otherwise known as my memorandum. I threw myself into it, spending twelve hour days reading and researching, sometimes working while lying flat on my back on the floor because I was in the grip of a nasty inner ear infection that gave me vertigo. (Someday I will tell you how I discovered baby lawyers were not allowed to be sick. But that is a story for another day.)

My then-husband was quite supportive. An extraordinarily bright man, he listened as I talked endlessly about the project and my findings. He made helpful comments here and there even though he was not a lawyer himself. And I’m sure in the back of his mind was his devout hope I would survive to become a Newly MintedPartner one day for our Mutual Economic Benefit.

Trouble was, about three days into the project, I saw why The Firm had lost. The existing law was against what they were trying to do. The judge, whom Newly Minted Partner had not had nice things to say about (use your imagination, but remember to keep it professional), had actually gotten the law quite right. Oh, dear. What was a baby lawyer to do?

Now, despite what happened next to me in this story, the truth is the best lawyers are creative. Think Thurgood Marshall and Brown v. Board of Education. He saw the possibilities in the law where none yet existed and pushed forward to change the lives of every non-white, non-male American forever. (Yes, Virginia, the African American civil rights movement made the Women’s Movement Possible. And now the push for Gay Rights. We owe it all to Thurgood.)

Anyway, I wrote my memo, explaining the existing state of the law and then explaining how Newly Minted Partner and Mentor Male Senior Partner could draft a new pleading, using the Sex Discrimination Law creatively for an Age Discrimination client. If it had been a law school exam, I would have had an A plus plus. I finished, after a nearly all nighter, handed over the thirty page extravaganza, and went home to sleep the sleep of the Righteous. My then husband, Ph.D. in English in hand, had read my magnum opus and congratulated me on my writing and my presentation. Even he, a non-lawyer, got it.

TWO WEEKS LATER:

I know it was the end of February. I like to think maybe it was leap year and the 29th, so it is a day not often to be repeated. But I am not sure. I was summoned to the Ninth Floor to the office of Newly Minted Partner where I expected to receive congratulations on my work. For not every one of us spiffy little J.D.’s can see how the law can be pushed and molded and prodded to the next level of social change. And no one had ever said I couldn’t research and write with the best of them. Until that day.

She was one of those enviably thin women whose suit skirts never had to be fastened with a safety pin. (True confessions. All that sitting at a desk and Firm Luncheons had taken its toll on me.) She had the short, professional haircut we all thought was required in the eighties, and she had the most highly polished French manicure I had ever seen. She was certainly a woman in charge of her life and highly successful in a world and time where women did not succeed. She’d sacrificed marriage and children to her success, but I assumed it was a choice she happily made.

I admired her as a sort of Legal Rock Star. And I had put my everything into her work. And she spent the next forty-five minutes telling me what a Worthless piece of Human Trash I was. About three minutes into the diatribe, delivered in the low professional tones you would associate with someone of her standing, I realized that she hated me, my work, and the creative solution I’d given her. Rather than seeing the beauty of my striving, she pronounced me an ignoramus for not coming to her on Day Three of the project and telling her the law was not on their side. (Something I had assumed was obvious from the beginning since they were the victims of Summary Judgment.)

Newly Minted Partner wore hats. Even now, it is rare to see a professional woman in a hat. Especially a red hat. As the diatribe continued, I fixed my eyes on the stryofoam head behind her desk that held her hat and pictured my head there in the morning, eyes glassy in what she would have considered my well-deserved death. The whole idea was so ludicrous, I wanted to laugh out loud. But I’m sure Newly Minted Partner would not have taken it well.

Her parting shot, as she released me from the hell of her office, was “We couldn’t bill the client for your work!” The ultimate disgrace for a Big Firm baby lawyer.

I went home and cried all night. My then-husband tried to comfort me, reminding me over and over how unreasonable she had been. But she looked so wise and knowing behind that Big Firm desk under the guise of Big Firm Partnership, I forgot who I was. And I let her bully and humiliate me. And then I eventually fled to the other side of the world, away from everything familiar, cutting a swath through the center of my life, in an effort to escape my own incompetence. Except, I wasn’t incompetent. And I had nothing to escape. But I was a long way from discovering that fact in the first autumn of my daughter’s life.

So, as I began to come back to myself in the mild California January, I blamed myself for being creative – the very thing I was born to be.

Below:  Richmond in Winter.

Read Full Post »

Don’t Change the Words or the Spell Will Be Broken or When is a Lawyer Like a Wizard?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 26, 2012| 2 Comments »

After my first terrifying experience as a “trial lawyer,” in October 1981, I devoutly prayed each night I wouldn’t be sent back to court any time soon to sit behind a counsel table. Of course, if you stop and think about it, sending a one-day old lawyer with no trial experience into the lion’s den of superior court to oppose an injunction was an especially rotten and unreasonable thing to do. I had, after all, taken a job with A BIG FIRM to learn from highly talented and experienced attorneys. Imagine what I would have learned that October afternoon by watching the Firm’s Tallest Partner in action, instead of being fed to the wolves myself.

But even in 1986, hiding out in San Diego, holding my crying infant night and day, a world away from the east coast and that first job, and with the vague feeling I was running away from something I could not name, I was still looking back on those baby lawyer days and blaming myself. Shouldn’t have.

After the year rolled over into 1982, (did I mention they made me and me alone, work on Thanksgiving Day?) my old nemesis Legal Aid reared its head. THE FIRM expected baby lawyers to take on Legal Aid clients pro bono, and I was happy to sign up for mine. I actually thought lawyers could change the world by helping poor people back then. Wrong again.

My client was a twenty-year-old highly attractive African American woman who wanted a divorce. She’d been married a year, no kids, no money. In theory a slam-dunk legal proceeding. Her major drawback was she liked to sit in my office for hours spinning obvious yarns about abuse at the hands of her soon-to-be ex. I wondered if the lawyer-client privilege allowed me to tell her I didn’t believe a word she said.

Legal Aid helpfully sent along THE FORMS that I was supposed to file to ask for her divorce. Now, by this time, I had begun to suspect that law was not about language so much as about filling in blanks. I spent a lot of my time drafting “Interrogatories” which are questions one side in litigation poses to the other to figure out what their evidence is going to be at trial. The art of drafting Interrogatories basically consisted of copying the forms from the book, inserting the correct gendered pronouns, and sending these linguistic wonders to the typing pool. (And yes, we had an overnight typing pool that took over when the secretaries went home.)

But as I worked on the Legal Aid forms, asking for my client’s divorce, I saw better ways to say what needed to be said. I had, after all, a Masters in English and had worked on my Ph.D. I had been a technical editor. I had taught writing. Wouldn’t I be the one to know if there was a better way to say it? Apparently not.

I crafted the divorce documents and had them filed with the court where they would percolate for six months until the State of Virginia decided to free my client of her improvident marriage decision. I never expected to get anything back other than a piece of paper saying my client was a free woman. So imagine my dismay and horror, when after three months, I was personally summoned to the judge’s chambers one afternoon.

His Honor, sans robes, sat at his desk, the court file for my client’s case in front of him. I sat on the other side, in my man-tailored lawyer suit, starched blouse, floppy bow, and one-inch heeled pumps. I could see red marks that looked like blood trails all over the top paper in the file on His Honor’s desk. It was the pleading I had filed.

After ten seconds, I surmised a couple of things. One, His Honor hated me. No clue why. But he did. Two, he hadn’t called me in to thank me for volunteering for Legal Aid.

For the next hour, His Honor spat out a monologue about how THE FORMS were sacrosanct and NOT A WORD COULD BE CHANGED. According to His Honor, the words I had substituted in place of the SACRED TEXT made my pleadings totally inadequate, and my client could not get a divorce. He made it clear he had nothing but contempt for BIG FIRM ASSOCIATES who were trying to be Legal Aid volunteers. In his view, we should stick to representing only BIG BUCK CLIENTS because that was all we were good for. I didn’t have to read His Honor’s bio to figure out he’d never darkened the door of a BIG FIRM before going on the bench.

My punishment was to have my pleadings declared null and void, and I was sentenced to the ignominy of slinking back to my office and drafting new ones, this time inserting only my client’s name, her gender pronoun, and the correct dates into the text. After having these prepared in overnight secretarial, a winged-foot firm messenger deposited these linguistic gems in the courthouse. And my client would now have to wait another six months for singlehood because of my incompetence.  The first three percolating months with the WRONG WORDS didn’t count.

So what had I learned so far about being a lawyer? A couple of things. First, being sent to court to oppose injunctions was like being Daniel cast into the Fiery Furnace. Except no angel came down to get between me and the judge who said my client was lying. Major slip up in heaven that day.

Two, lawyers, whom I had thought practiced law, were actually practioners of black magic, wearing black man-tailored suits instead of wizard robes, but pretty much doing the same thing that wizards do: casting spells for dissolution of marriage using spells set out WORD FOR WORD AND NOT TO BE CHANGED in THE SACRED BOOK OF FORMS. Yep, being a lawyer was not what I’d expected. And creative? Well, law school said lawyers were creative, but so far I wasn’t seeing it.

Next time: My Head on a Pike or THE MEMO WE CAN’T BILL THE CLIENT FOR!!!! 

Read Full Post »

More Baby Lawyer Adventures or Death by Courtroom

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 21, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I began law school at the University of Tennessee in the summer of 1978. I had no idea what lawyers actually did, but liberal arts grads all around me were turning into them, so I figured I could, too. My then husband, like me an English major with a graduate degree and no teaching job, was happy to see me darken the legal doors of learning.

I came out in 1981, number two in my class, and still without much of an idea of what lawyers did. For three years I had done what I excelled at – read, memorize, and regurgitate facts – but I had never been inside a courtroom or taken a deposition or even seen a real live client. I had done one mock oral argument in moot court my first year with sweaty hands, a dry mouth, and a heart slamming in my chest. That was the entire extent of my “practical training” in law school. (Think medical school where you memorize the symptoms of every disease on earth but never see a body, dead or alive.)

At first being a lawyer wasn’t so bad. I’d accepted a job with a Big Firm in Virginia where I had family, and they paid me to study for the bar all summer, sitting in the apartment they rented for me and my husband. I watched the ducks swim on the pond out back and re-memorized all the law I’d learned in three years of law school. This time, Virginia style.

On the day before Princess Diana married Prince Charles, I drove to Roanoke where I stayed in the hotel room The Firm paid for. Next morning, I put on my lawyer suit, went to the Civic Center, and sat at a long table where I took the Virginia Bar under the watchful eye of the Bar Examiners IN PERSON. They sat on a dias above us and watched us spill our brains into blue books for two, very long days. (Weren’t they bored to death?) At night, I ate room service and watched the royal wedding.

Perhaps the fate of that marriage was a metaphor for the fate of my Big Firm career.

On my thirty-first birthday in August, I put on my lawyer suit again – this time supposedly for good – and took my place in my tiny office at The Firm in the litigation section. Until the Bar Examiners certified me as “passed,” I could not sign pleadings or take depositions or appear in court as anything except a clerk. And that was just fine with me. I wrote research memoranda that, as one senior lawyer observed, he could actually follow and understand. What a concept!

But my luck ran out in October. The day after I passed the bar, I was sent to court with the Firm’s Tallest Partner (I am five feet two), to oppose an injunction that Legal Aid was seeking against one of Our Most Powerful Clients. The Firm’s Tallest Partner was only there to watch me; I was the performing bear that afternoon. Of course, it was not a major matter (or they wouldn’t have sent newly-minted lawyer me); but, as far as I was concerned, it was The End of The World.

I didn’t even know which table to stand behind in the courtroom. And what questions to ask my witness? OMG. No CLUE. I used up at least three of my nine lives that afternoon, standing mute behind the defendant’s table, listening to the judge tell me he didn’t believe my witness. (While I wondered what the witness had actually said and what to say to a judge who says your witness is lying.)

A couple of miserable hours later, the Firm’s Tallest Partner, who had watched me demonstrate total incompetence in that courtroom, walked me back to The Firm in a steady downpour, with no umbrellas. My client had been enjoined, big time. Or small time, really; but it didn’t feel that way to me. It was my own personal Trail of Tears. The Firm’s Tallest Partner had nothing to say to me on the way back. I wondered if I’d offered to throw myself in the James River, if he would have given me a push.

Never mind that I had been a successful English graduate student, teaching three sections of freshman composition per semester. Never mind that I could take kids from writing C themes to A themes and have them laughing all the way. (Beware the flying commas!) Never mind that I could recite the Rules of Evidence backward and forward, and I actually understood Constitutional Law, including the dreaded Commerce Clause. Law on the hoof was a very different animal than in the classroom, my home turf. Teaching colleagues had always said they could stand in the hallway and know which class was mine because that was the room that the laughter was coming out of. Judges don’t laugh. Killer creative comedic timing is a useless skill before THEIR HONORS.

So for the next two years, I struggled to figure out the alien world I had landed in by mistake. Next time: More Baby Lawyer Adventures or The Judge who Taught Me Why You Never Change the Words and Still to Come: the Female Partner Who wore HATS and Ate Associates for Breakfast and High Tea

Below:  the James River

Read Full Post »

Hiding in Plain Sight or Who is that Woman in the Lawyer Suit?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 19, 2012| Leave a Comment »

So in the fall of 1986, alone in a tiny rented cottage on an island in San Diego Bay, I set off on the journey of motherhood. My lawyer suits, one gray, one beige, one black, one navy, one brown, hung listlessly in the closet of the bedroom I shared with the husband I never saw. My black, tan, and navy four-inched heeled pumps remained in their shoe boxes. For the first three months of the journey, I rarely got out of my bathrobe. After that, it was elastic waist pants and frantic dieting until, finally at my daughter’s first birthday, I could sigh with relief and zip my jeans.

The task of dealing with a constantly crying infant wiped my memory clean of what it had been like to be a lawyer, pulling twelve and fourteen-hour days in major law firms back east. I truly wanted children when I finally decided to have them, but I also think I was on the run from a profession I hated and that I had never intended to join.

When I was eleven years old, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I read constantly even before I went to school, and I began to write stories in third grade. I had no doubt in my child mind that I was born to be a creative artist until the night I announced my intended destiny at the family dinner table. My rational, linear father went crazy, outlining the impossibility and stupidity of trying to reach that goal. I slunk back to my bedroom, full of shame for aspiring to be something so outrageous and totally WRONG.

The trouble was, the dream of writing stories would not go away. I realized it was safer to hide my identity underground, as I went on writing. By age thirteen, I had finished a three-hundred page novel.

I thought by going to graduate school and getting a Ph.D. in English, I would move forward with my dream of being a writer. But by the time I had my Masters in English, I could see the reality of every graduate student’s situation: THERE WERE NO JOBS IN UNIVERSITIES TEACHING ENGLISH. And graduate school, like all the other forms of school I had encountered, did not foster creativity.

In the 1970’s, disappointed liberal arts majors of all kinds were going to law school, including, for the first time a significant number of women. I went to talk to the Assistant Dean at the University of Tennessee College of Law about enrolling. She said, “The law is only words. You’re good at words, right?”

Good at words, yes. Good at nit picking trivialities, no. I graduated second in my class; I was admitted to the Order of the Coif, the Phi Beta Kappa for lawyers. I was wooed by major law firms in New York, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Richmond, Virginia. I studied for and passed the Virginia bar in 1981.

But as soon as I sat down at my new associate desk in Richmond, the overwhelming lack of creativity that is THE LAW began to choke me. I had never been so bored in my life.

Next: Driving the wrong way down a one-way street (my perilous adventures as a baby lawyer) and how I was nearly gobbled alive by a female partner with a penchant for hats

Image

Read Full Post »

Autumn in a Foreign Land, or Life as an Ex-Pat

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Autumn has come to Southern California. Trouble is, the change is so subtle you have to know what to look for to realize the seasons are turning. Suddenly the air seems very focused and sharp, even though the temperature is still 81º. Crows caw, sounding ominous and lonely in the late afternoon heat. Fewer mallards, and now no ducklings, swim circles among the dry reeds in the  pond close to our house. Trees grow brown, and their leaves shrivel, but hang on. Here and there, a few liquid amber trees – a relative of the Eastern maple – change color, some turn dry gold, others dusty red. But autumn here looks more like summer drying up than a season of breathtaking color and bountiful harvest.

I know because I am an ex-pat Southern girl. People hear my accent and ask how I got from Tennessee to Southern California. The answer is simple: in 1985, I agreed to a too hasty marriage to the wrong person, who had taken a job here. Without even one prior visit, I arrived in San Diego in November 1985 and realized at once I was living in a foreign country. I hadn’t bargained for that. But I hadn’t bargained for much of what was to come.

Autumn in the South, is a deep, lush season. It begins in September with crisp, cool mornings warming to sharp, golden noons, and cooling to vermillion sunsets. The trees go from green to brilliant gold and flaming orange and red almost overnight. Then the leaves fall, covering the grass in deep pools of vibrant color. When I was a child, my parents paid me a minuscule wage to rake them into piles to be carted away to compost. I couldn’t resist the temptation to build leaf forts first and jump into them, scattering red and gold in all directions.

Autumn in the South means FOOTBALL. (Not football.) When I couldn’t be bribed into raking, my father would take over the chore, wearing a soft plaid flannel shirt, transistor radio in his breast pocket. The long golden afternoons marched to the steady cadence of the announcer’s voice, punctuated by my father’s sharp cries of joy or dismay at Tennessee’s progress.

Autumn was bittersweet for me because it meant back to school. On one hand, school was my forte: I was an excellent student. On the other, school was the place I began to perfect the art of covering my true identity from the world. Good little Debbie Hawkins with her pigtails who sat up straight in her desk, did her homework, and never gave the teacher any trouble was not the real me. The real me was hiding underground.

Autumn always brought new clothes. In those days, mothers sewed. Late August meant sitting on high stools in department stores, looking at pattern books, and picking out new school dresses. I wasn’t a fan of figuring out which patterns to buy. You could never tell until they were sewn up if the dress was going to flatter or make you want to hide forever. But I loved walking between the tables that held the bolts of fabric, fingering the soft wools, the supple jerseys, and the crisp cottons. I wanted one of each. School was rarely a creative exercise. It involved regurgitating long lists of facts the teachers thought our lives depended upon. But holding and draping fabric in autumn grays and tans and browns – ah, that was pure magic!

My first child was born during the beginning of the second autumn that I lived here in exile. She was a September baby, coming at just the moment when the lazy summer air focused sharply on turning the corner into fall. The man whom I had married had vanished back to his twelve-hour days at the office. I had thought we would at least share parenthood. But I was wrong. Alone in a tiny rented cottage, I struggled to learn the ways of new motherhood with a child who cried twenty hours of every day. One morning, I saw a group of children from the local preschool pause in front of the liquid amber tree in the cottage’s front yard. They were picking up the dusty gold leaves that had fallen. That poor lonely liquid amber was the only tree of its kind in our tiny community. The rest were palm trees and evergreens. No wonder the children had journeyed from their school to see a phenomenon that in the South was as common as breathing autumn air. Alone and exhausted, I began to cry for all the autumns my California children would never have.

Since that day, I have traveled a long journey, coming to love this strange, raw land that is home to my three amazing children. I have decide this blog is going to become the story of that journey; and how I, perpetually an ex-pat, came to terms with largely foreign ways. Once upon a long time ago, I was a graduate English student, studying Irish literature. Somewhere during those days, I read that if you are born Irish, you are always Irish, no matter where life takes you. And now, after more than twenty years in exile, I can say, if you are born Southern, you are always Southern, even if you marry the wrong person and raise children in a foreign land. But I can also say, that leaving and looking back teaches you so very, very much about who you are and how to appreciate the place that created you. If I had never left, I would never have learned who was hiding inside of me.

Stay tuned for more of the journey. And happy autumn wherever you are.

Fall in San Diego

Southern California autumn

In Tennessee

Tennessee autumn

Some content on this page was disabled on March 24, 2021 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from Dennis Flaherty. You can learn more about the DMCA here:

https://wordpress.com/support/copyright-and-the-dmca/

Read Full Post »

The Joys of Flying Solo or Why the Bar is A Better Choice Than the Door

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 14, 2012| 3 Comments »

Single life has many advantages. No problems with toilet seats up or down. No one to say you didn’t need yet another pair of killer heels. No one to steal the covers on a cold night. No one to complain if you would rather Zumba at supper time instead of cook. And you can’t fight with yourself over who takes out the trash. (Well, you can, just to stay in practice, I guess.)

But despite these advantages, I recently overheard a fellow single complaining about her single life. She had visited her neighborhood restaurant for the first time alone, and the hospitality was not the same as when she’d come paired. She’d decided to take herself out solo on a busy weekend night; and instead of being given the table she’d requested, she’d been asked to sit at the bar. Insulted, she left, vowing never to return. And cursing singledom.

Many years ago, I had exactly the same experience in a small neighborhood restaurant in Richmond Virginia’s Fan District. On a Friday night, having just come back from a business trip to Washington, D.C, and still in regulation lawyer gear, I encountered the same choice: the bar or the door. I chose the door. But since then, I have discovered that was the wrong choice.

Here’s the thing. The joy of going out alone is the opportunity to observe the world on your own. Sometimes you meet new people; sometimes you don’t. But the information you gather while out alone is entertaining and enriching.

The bar is not a bad place to eat when you are alone. Why? Watch people eating at the bar sometime. They chat and interact with each other. If you are there with your friends, you enjoy the evening; but you don’t hear a new story from a new potential friend or silently watch a drama played out between strangers while being happy you aren’t on that stage. When you’re out in pairs or groups, it’s same old, same old.

Last weekend, for example, I headed up to Los Angeles to hear jazz at Vitello’s on Friday night. Alone. Now, downstairs at Vitello’s is strictly a restaurant. But the room upstairs, quaintly named “Upstairs at Vitello’s,” is a jazz and supper club. Those of us with tickets for the show were waiting downstairs while the band finished its sound check. An elderly couple were waiting with the rest of us to go upstairs. The man had a bandage over one eye. The woman used a cane. Suddenly a small woman, around my age, got up from one of the chairs along the wall and offered them her seat. Impressed with her good manners, I complimented her. She laughed and said with twinkling eyes, “It’s karma. I hope someone will give me a seat when I’m their age.” Petite, with short dark hair and laughing brown eyes, she looked like an elf that had just materialized from another, more magical world.

Soon we learned we were expat daughters of the South. She was originally from Richmond, Virginia, but had traveled widely since then. We compared notes on adapting to life in SoCal and why we finally came to love it here. But the most touching part of her story was her description of her marriage. “I’m a widow,” she said but with a smile. “My husband died seven years ago. He was the only man for me. My soulmate. It was wonderful, and I could never replace him. I’m happy on my own. I miss him, but I’m so very grateful for those years we had.” Not a trace of bitterness in her voice. Just joy and exuberance and gratitude. She was obviously a very happy person. Happy in her life right at that moment. And her happiness was contagious.

I wanted to sit with her, but Vitello’s had other plans. So I went on to hear other stories that night from the people around me as I listened to the music. None were as interesting as hers, but I had a fabulous time solo, entertained by not only the music, but by the people who had come to hear it.

So single life is quite fabulous when you stop telling yourself you have to be validated by the presence of someone else. You are wonderful company for yourself. And perfect just the way you are. Love yourself right where you are, and the world will love you, too. That’s what I learned from my elf friend that night.


Read Full Post »

The Meaning of BLING or Why Questions in Line at FedEx are Entertaining

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The Irish and Southerners are born storytellers. Think James Joyce or William Faulkner, or John Grisham. When I was a child in Tennessee and we visited the extended family, the women sat in the kitchen telling stories about their lives as wives, and the men sat in livingroom telling stories about sports and jobs and politics.

By accident I became a lawyer. But by birth I am a storyteller. Fortunately, lawyers tell stories, so I got it half right.

In California people do not like to wait. Show Californians a line, and they will begin to complain. This annoys me because growing up Southern, I learned it is polite to take your turn. Even if that means waiting. And polite waiting is not grumbling about it.

As you can imagine, as an appellate attorney who essentially writes legal term papers for a living, I am a huge patron of FedEx. They make all my briefs ready to go to the court of appeal. So one of the places, I am often in line is my local, favorite FedEx.

On Sunday morning I bopped in wearing my workout attire because I was on my way to the gym. (And no makeup, by the way. A real switch up for a daughter of the South who wouldn’t leave the house without mascara for most of her life. I am certain I will die with my mascara ON.) Before the guy working the counter could find my latest legal gem, now copied and bound and looking oh so All Pro, he had to wait on the customer ahead of me. She was involved in directing him in some sort of copying job. I immediately switched into “waiting mode” and studied my counter companion. She was a middled aged woman, wearing sweat pants, t-shirt, and jeans jacket. I could tell she had spent at least ten seconds pulling this outfit together. She was definitely not thesartorialist.com material. But what set her apart was the plethora of gold and diamond jewelry on her hands. Literally a ring on each finger. A BIG one with a BIG diamond in each.

Now, it was a bit much. And I wouldn’t do it. But it worked on her for some odd reason. So I complimented her jewelry.

She broke into a huge smile as people often do when they know you are interested in their story. She explained the rings were gifts from her children although she had chosen them herself. “I ask them to give me money throughout the year for birthday and Christmas and Mother’s Day. And I save up in a special account, and I buy something I want.” Then I realized she now carried with her every day on every finger a visible reminder of her children’s love. So her jewelry wasn’t too much, after all. It was just right for her. It’s amazing how you enrich your own life when you give away a compliment and receive a story in return.

Read Full Post »

Why Music Matters or “It Ain’t Right”!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 1, 2012| 1 Comment »

In 2004, Russell Shedd took over the music program at Scripps Ranch High. My first contact with Russ was when he called our house looking for my oldest child, Catherine, who was a rising senior at Scripps. A percussionist, she had organized the percussion cabinet at the end of the year and had left a note taped to the door with her phone number, threatening death or great bodily injury to anyone who put anything on top of the timpani. In that era, parents and students alike thought the timpani were convenient way stations for books, hoodies, and backpacks. Never mind the concept of tuning.

I had to tell Russ that Catherine was at Tanglewood in Massachusetts and wouldn’t be back for a couple of weeks. Right away I realized I’d given him the wrong impression of the Scripps music program. In those days the kids took band because it wasn’t Phys. Ed. Catherine’s trip to Tanglewood was the product of her own drive to become a musician and our family’s deep reverence for all things musical. I have studied clarinet since I was nine. We were the exception, not the rule.

But Russ had a vision for that program. He wanted to make it his own. And he wanted to teach kids MUSIC. He fought his way past the parents who didn’t understand what a music education from Interlochen and the University of Cincinnati meant. A fine clarinet player, he took the time to actually give recitals, so the unbelievers could become believers. And they did.

And because band can be fun, he thought of ways to encourage the kids to work hard but to have fun. Responding to his enthusiasm and joy for teaching music, the good kids began to come. One by one, including my youngest child, Michael. Little by little, the program grew. The marching band might be small, but everyone on the field was playing. No horn holders. And the depth of sound that Russ could create with fifty kids rivaled the big bands where half the kids weren’t playing because they were just there for the Phys. Ed. credit. And when he wanted new uniforms for the band, he led the fund raising drive by training for and entering a 50-mile run to get money for the uniforms.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the orchestra grew and thrived. It went from four violins, a viola, and a cello – none of whom had a clue about tuning – to seventy amazing musicians. So amazing, in fact, that in April, Russ won the California Association for Music Education’s Award as Orchestral Music Educator of the Year for Southern California. Oh, and in his spare time, he became the full-time choir teacher and the AP music theory teacher, too. In other words, he became the entire music department.

So how does this story of great talent, perseverance, and love for teaching end? With a pink slip. That’s right, dear reader. For all his hard work and dedication, the school district sent Russ a pink slip in May. Raises to more senior teachers – even though Russ has tenure – required the district to let some teachers go. And hire date was the determining factor – not achievement.

In my attorney life, I hear a lot about injustice. And I see some, too. But not nearly as much as you’d think. But this injustice tops the record books. No wonder qualified dedicated people don’t want to be teachers. I left that field many years ago, heartbroken because I couldn’t find a job doing what I loved, teaching writing. And watching Russ’s efforts, achievement, and education be discounted this way, hurts me to the core. And tells me I made the right decision all those years ago.

Children and their education are our future. The study of music will teach a child everything he or she needs to be succeed in life even if he or she doesn’t become a musician. We need to stand up for our outstanding teachers because the school district doesn’t appreciate them. If Russ does finally have to move on, I know there is a school district out there that will highly value his dedication and talent. It’s just that it should be the one here, right now, where he has worked so hard for the past eight years. As a local TV commentator says every night, “It ain’t right!”

Read Full Post »

With Words and With Silence or A Tale of Pinnochio’s Nose

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 30, 2012| Leave a Comment »

About two mornings a week, a former FBI agent drops an e-mail into my in-box offering to teach me how to tell when someone is lying to me. For a large fee. Now, my father was an FBI agent for 30 years, and I am in favor of retired agents earning a good living. But do I really want to know when someone is lying?

Image

Well, yes. Sometimes I do. The man who tells me he’s available and who has three girlfriends on the hook and wants to me make me number four. Yeah, I’d like to know what he’s up to. But honestly, a little research on Facebook (at no cost) answered THAT question.

Image

Then as an attorney there are my clients. Who are convicted of various crimes by the time they get to me, the appellate attorney. But I do the same job for them, regardless of guilt or innocence. In fact, knowing positively they are guilty would be a real downer. So, no. I don’t care about learning how to decipher their perfidy (don’t you love English majors who write blogs?) by analyzing their handwriting. Besides, the law’s “truth” and everyone else’s “truth” are two different things. (Think Casey Anthony and OJ Simpson.) But we’ll leave that explanation for another blog.

I do wonder what the former FBI agent would teach me as the signs of being lied to. Not making eye contact? Shifting from one foot to another? Nervous tick? Elaborate story that does not stand up under my cross-examination? I’m not sure I need to pay a lot of money to learn that stuff. It’s kind of obvious.

And then there are the “nose growers.” You know. The Pinnochios whose noses grow when they lie. Well, not literally. But with some people if you swallow their story the first time knowing even as you listen it can’t be right, eventually they will fess up to the truth. You just have to wait long enough. I’ve known a number of these people. Patience pays off.

ImageI admit that being lied to makes me angry. It violates my sense of what is right in the world. I don’t encourage it, and I don’t like to encounter it. And I avoid engaging in it. But some social lies grease the wheels of life. Like not telling new parents their baby isn’t beautiful – yet. Or the poor man trapped by the dreaded question, “Do these pants make me look fat?” Or the dinner guest faced with “Don’t you want seconds?” when firsts were nearly impossible to hide under the mashed potatoes. Some social lies just have to be, no matter how we feel morally about the entire subject of lying.

So, even if the former FBI agent could make me an infallible human lie detector, I’m not sure I’d want that skill. And I’m glad noses don’t grow when we lie. Then, too, as Adrienne Rich said, “Lying is done with words, and also with silence.” And those, I think, are the most powerful lies of all.

Read Full Post »

The Old Man’s Rose – A Tale of an Unlikely Artist

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 23, 2012| 3 Comments »

I never knew his name although he was my neighbor. I saw him every afternoon around four o’clock when I went by his condo, walking my Golden Retrievers, Melody and Rhythm. He would be standing by the plastic pot that held his rose bush, smoking a cigarette, and tending the rose. Usually he was tweaking the black irrigation tube that had been jerry-rigged from the main irrigation system to the pot. In the California desert, nothing grows that isn’t watered. So, he had to really love that rose because he had gone to so much trouble for it.

He looked like the Santa Claus figure that adorned his Christmas display every year. He and Santa were short, round, and bald. Fiftyish or sixtyish. He always wore a plaid shirt, and khaki pants that wrinkled over the tops of his tennys because they were too long. Even in the dead of winter, he never spoiled his rumpled look with a jacket.

As I came along the street with my dogs, he would look up from fussing with the rose and waive and smile. Sometimes he said, “Beautiful dogs.” I never said, “Beautiful rose.” Now I wish I had.

Every winter I wondered where he had grown up because at Christmas he covered the handkerchief-sized patch of ground in front of his condo with sheets of cotton, stretched out to mimic snow. Although up close they looked like the forgery they were, from a distance I was always struck by the oddity of snow on the ground on a 75 degree December day in San Diego. Clearly the rose and the snow were important to him. I told him once how much I liked the snow, and he smiled.

I never saw his wife, but I’m sure he had one. He looked like the sort of man who’d have a wife. I expect she was inside cooking dinner in the afternoons while he smoked and tended his rose. I bet she was, after all, the reason he couldn’t smoke in the house.

And I think he had grown children, too, although I never saw them, either. A boy and a girl. And I guessed several grandchildren who called him, “Grandpa.”

The garage sales began innocuously in the fall two years ago. On Saturday mornings, as Melody and Rhythm and I passed by, his drive would be filled with odd pots and pans, stacks of dishes, mismatched chairs and tables, a basket of used clothing, and, once, a sewing machine cabinet.

He averaged about one sale a month that winter. Bit by bit his life went up for sale to the bargain hunters in minivans and SUV’s. But the saddest one – the one when I should have realized something was up – was in January. One Saturday morning, not long after all the “cotton snow” had been rolled up and put away for another year, plastic five-foot Santa sat in the midst of the garage sale offerings with a $5.00 tag around his neck. Despite all his tackyness, I should have bought him for old time’s sake.

Then came the saddest day of all. In late May the dogs and I passed by one day to find the little old man tending his rose as ususal, but the pot was nearly invisible because moving boxes were stacked everywhere on the sidewalk. The man waved and smiled but didn’t invite further conversation. Where was he going? He had abandoned Santa. Would he abandon his rose?

Two days later, I saw he had left it behind. No more boxes on the walk. Empty house. And the rose still blooming in its pot, but without the old man beside it. Would it survive and thrive without him?

It did. I suppose he left it as tiny legacy of beauty for the rest of us. That corner of the world had no other ornament, and he knew his irrigation lifeline would keep it thriving, even without his gentle touch every afternoon.

I’ll never know his story, but my dogs and I still pass his rose every day, and I think of him. He didn’t look like an artist, but he created something beautiful and gave it away. So, I think, he was.

ImageImageImage

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »