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 flags-one, 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