One
MY DECISION TO BECOME A LAWYER was irrevocably sealed when I realized my
father hated the legal profession. I was a young teenager, clumsy, embarrassed by my
awkwardness, frustrated with life, horrified of puberty, about to be shipped off to a
military school by my father for insubordination. He was an ex-Marine who believed
boys should live by the crack of the whip. I'd developed a quick tongue and an aversion
to discipline, and his solution was simply to send me away. It was years before I forgave
him.
He was also an industrial engineer who worked seventy hours a week for a company that
made, among many other items, ladders. Because by their very nature ladders are
dangerous devices, his company became a frequent target of lawsuits. And because he
handled design, my father was the favorite choice to speak for the company in
depositions and trials. I can't say that I blame him for hating lawyers, but I grew to
admire them because they made his life so miserable. He'd spend eight hours haggling
with them, then hit the martinis as soon as he
walked in the door. No hellos. No hugs. No dinner. Just an hour or so of continuous
bitching while he slugged down four martinis then passed out in his battered re-cliner.
One trial lasted three weeks, and when it ended with a large verdict against the company
my mother called a doctor and they hid him in a hospital for a month.
The company later went broke, and of course all blame was directed at the lawyers. Not
once did I hear any talk that maybe a trace of mismanagement could in any way have
contributed to the bankruptcy.
Liquor became his life, and he became depressed. He went years without a steady job,
which really ticked me off because I was forced to wait tables and deliver pizza so I
could claw my way through college. I think I spoke to him twice during the four years of
my undergraduate studies. The day after I learned I had been accepted to law school, I
proudly returned home with this great news. Mother told me later he stayed in bed for a
week.
Two weeks after my triumphant visit, he was changing a lightbulb in the utility room
when (I swear this is true) a ladder collapsed and he fell on his head. He lasted a year in a
coma in a nursing home before someone mercifully pulled the plug.
Several days after the funeral, I suggested the possibility of a lawsuit, but Mother was
just not up to it. Also, I've always suspected he was partially inebriated when he fell. And
he was earning nothing, so under our tort system his life had little economic value.
My mother received a grand total of fifty thousand dollars in life insurance, and
remarried badly. He's a simple sort, my stepfather, a retired postal clerk from Toledo, and
they spend most of their time square dancing and traveling in a Winnebago. I keep my
distance. Mother didn't offer me a dime of the money, said it was all she had to face the
future with, and since I'd proven rather
adept at living on nothing, she felt I didn't need any of it. I had a bright future earning
money; she did not, she reasoned. I'm certain Hank, the new husband, was filling her ear
full of financial advice. Our paths will cross again one day, mine and Hank's.
I will finish law school in May, a month from now, then I'll sit for the bar exam in July. I
will not graduate with honors, though I'm somewhere in the top half of my class. The
only smart thing I've done in three years of law school was to schedule the required and
difficult courses early, so I could goof off in this, my last semester. My classes this spring
are a joke-Sports Law, Art Law, Selected Readings from the Napoleonic Code and, my
favorite, Legal Problems of the Elderly.
It is this last selection that has me sitting here in a rickety chair behind a flimsy folding
table in a hot, damp metal building filled with an odd assortment of seniors, as they like
to be called. A hand-painted sign above the only visible door majestically labels the place
as the Cypress Gardens Senior Citizens Building, but other than its name the place has
not the slightest hint of flowers or greenery. The walls are drab and bare except for an
ancient, fading photograph of Ronald Reagan in one corner between two sad little flagsone,
the Stars and Stripes, the other, the state flag of Tennessee. The building is small,
somber and cheerless, obviously built at the last minute with "a few spare dollars of
unexpected federal money. I doodle on a legal pad, afraid to look at the crowd inching