Antonio's song

 I must be old now.  I have a case with an opposing lawyer I last faced seventeen years ago.  Strangely, I remembered his phone number.  

 Last time he was the lead attorney for Antonio Nascimento, a Brazilian man who was living on Cape Cod when his pickup truck, with its tragically bald tires, spun into and up onto a guardrail on Route 6, then flipped over twice, ejecting him out the passenger side window and through the air into a tree, at the base of which he was found a paraplegic.  His attorneys and their whore of an expert witness tried to convince Ford Motor Company and then a jury that an allegedly defective door latch failed and he was ejected out the door, instead of out the perfectly non-defective window as all the physical evidence suggested.  They pocketed 1.2 million from two other defendants before the case went to trial against us.

 When the evidence was in, I sat or strolled calmly around the courtroom through the long morning as the jury deliberated, and on through the lunch hour.  Up to the moment, not long after lunch, when the clerk poked his head in through the door at the back of the courtroom, flashing a quick "V" with his fingers.  "Verdict, counsellors.  The jury has a verdict."  The calm mood is shattered as quickly and thoroughly as if a brick had come crashing through a window.

 The jury marches in one last time, avoiding any eye contact with me.  A bad sign.  The clerk hands the verdict slip to the judge, who takes just a second to read it.  A good sign.  He hands the slip back to the clerk.  The clerk turns on his ministerial voice and reads the verdict.  "Question one.  Has the plaintiff proved by a preponderance of the evidence that the passenger door of his 1986 Ranger opened during the accident.  Answer, 'No.'"

 And just like that, a victory, in the biggest role of my professional life to that point.  Sweet, warm, bubbling victory.  

 I was glad we won.  And glad Antonio had gotten some money, a lot of money, from others.  At his deposition we had learned what happened with his girlfriend.  He learned that she had left him on the day that he was discharged from the hospital, when she never came to pick him up.

First and last

  How fast it goes, from firsts to lasts.  We're in the home stretch, now, of that particular run that is your oldest child's life at home.  She leaves for college in less than a hundred days, and is spending her time on lasts.  Her last gymnastics meets with her high school team, then her club team, then ever - with the state senior nationals team in Florida.  Her last high school classes and tests, with graduation in just a few days.  And all the other lasts, including the family ones we like to think about least.  We went to dinner the other night at a favorite place in Needham and I wondered, walking afterward for ice cream, was it the last time we would do this before she goes off to the rest of her life?  Sure, she'll come back for a summer, maybe two.  But it will be different then.  
   I am going to try hard to focus on the firsts and not the lasts, in all the good ways.  In all the ways that my life got so much bigger when I went away to college.  The first time you really live away from the house you grew up in.  The first time you really make decisions on your own, ones that matter.  The first time you sleep all night in a bed with someone else.  The first time you start thinking, for real, about what you might want to be in this world besides a student.  And all the other firsts.  
   It's all in front of her.  And all of a sudden.  It's hard to believe that seventeen years already have gone by since that Saturday night and on into Sunday morning, when the world ground slowly, painfully, finally to a complete and jolting stop.  And for a moment, just a brief moment, everything was absolutely, perfectly still.  And then the world slowly started turning again.  And everything, every last thing, was different.  She was born September 26, 1993, at 6:43 a.m..  When the world started all over again.
 

Walk in the woods

   It is lovely to walk in the woods behind my brother’s house in Ira.  As in most Vermont woods, you cannot go far in any direction before you find one of the lonesome stone walls that run, this way and that, through the trees.  The early settlers of these hills did not build walls in the forest, of course, no matter how much they believed, as Frost later wrote, that good fences make good neighbors.  The hills were cleared with heroic effort, mostly for sheep, only to be left to grow again when the sheep no longer paid. 

It is uplifting to walk in these woods – to see how nature, left to its own devices, can reclaim itself.  As we can, too.    

Something to remember on the hard days.

Dog's life

   As someone once said, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.  Or something like that.  And so this is the view I bring to that site so familiar to those of us who live and work in urban places:  the man or woman walking their dog while wearing a plastic bag on their hand like a mitten.  You know what that is for.  
   It seems to me you shouldn't own a dog unless you have a back door that you can let the dog burst out of in the morning, and the door opens onto a space at the end of which the dog can charge across the tenuous boundary between lawn and field and keep on going -- dodging and chasing whatever scents remain from last night's possums and raccoons and deer and, yes, to take a dump any old place he happens to be when the spirit moves him.  So to speak.
   Meanwhile, you are standing in the open doorway, or even better on a porch, drinking the cool morning air, thinking of your old neighbor back in Cambridge, the woman who walked her two little dogs on short leashes -- dogs that didn't walk so much as whirl around her feet like wind-blown leaves.  She is even older  now, and probably reduced to cats.

The right touch

   Dinner in DC with new colleagues in that office and others who have gathered for the firm's diversity retreat.  I end up sitting next to a woman about my age, with aggressively bleached hair and an equally aggressive need to call attention to herself and, strangely, her handbag, which she refers to her Prada.  "Oh, could you hand me my Prada?"  "Oh, where's my phone?  I must have left it in my Prada."  Oh, indeed.

   The Prada thing is only mildly annoying, and only embarrassing for her.  Unlike the other aggressive attention-grabbing moves, which begin with grabbing my arm, then sitting directly up against me to the point -- as I'm later told -- that some feared she just might sit in my lap.  Oh my.

    Ladies, this is not attractive.  Compare and contrast the appropriate, occasional light touch of a lady's hand upon your arm, which is delightful.  I have in mind a dear friend from college, who used to do this.  She used to touch me, and others I'm sure (I sigh) in just the right way for a woman to touch a man, even if they are friends and nothing more.  Lightly, on the forearm.  But not too lightly.

   The forearm is the perfect place.  If a woman touches a man high on the arm, above the elbow, he can feel as if she is steering him, telling him where to go and, probably, how fast and with whom.  If a woman touches him too low on the arm, and anywhere near the wrist, he can feel as if she is telling him to stop, to watch himself, to behave.  The forearm is the perfect place, especially if a woman touches him there lightly.  But not too lightly.

   The young woman who was my dear friend touched me in that way any number of times, for any number of reasons.  To say hello.  To get my attention.  To say come with me, or wait here while I fetch my coat.  To say goodbye, but I will see you soon.  And each time she touched me in that way, it was a little, rare, special moment.  It was wonderful each time, like it would be if a beautiful bird would light upon your arm.

The view from Longfellow Bridge

   If there is a better view from a subway train than the view from Longfellow Bridge, as the Red Line briefly runs above ground between Charles Street and Kendall Square, then I would like to see it.  For three years, when we lived in Porter Square and the firm was at One Beacon Street, I rode the Red Line between Cambridge and Boston every day.  Now it's just a few times a year.  Like the other day, when I rode to Harvard Square to have lunch with my friend Libby.  I used my Blackberry to snap this photo, hoping for something to work with.  And sure enough:  the low resolution of the camera, the hazy window of the train, the bright sunlight, and a little noodling with iPhoto, all  combined to make this picture which looks, to me, like a passable painting.  People who actually can paint must hate this sort of thing.  But I like it.
   

Justice delivered

     We finally killed Osama Bin Laden.  It is a dramatic story.  A cathartic moment.  A satisfying demonstration of American military and intelligence capability.  And, on the part of President Obama, balls of steel.  A lesser president, like his predecessor, would have sent a bunch of cruise missiles into the compound where the intelligence services concluded that Obama seemed likely, perhaps, to be living.  Obama had the stones to send in a bunch of Navy Seals in helicopters – a tremendous operational and political risk – to get the job done in a way that we would know, and the world would know, that Bin Laden was dead.  And they went in with the intention to just kill him and bring his body out.  Not capture him so we could spend years figuring out how and where and when to put him through some sort of trial, as if what he had done was merely criminal, instead of acts of war.  He deserved to be killed, by Americans, and knowing that it was Americans who had found him and come to kill him right in his home.  

   It’s been almost ten years since September 11, 2001, when I sat down and wrote this: 

    So this is what war is.  The United States was attacked this morning.  The World Trade Center towers have been destroyed by the impact of two hijacked airliners.  Another plane has crashed into the Pentagon.  A fourth has crashed not far from Pittsburgh.  Every airport in the country has been shut down.  The cities have been evacuated.  Including mine.  So I sit here on my back porch, trying to get some work done, listening to CNN on the radio, wondering what will happen next.

    We watched on a television in the lounge at work for a while today, before we all were sent home.  I was standing next to our managing partner, who served on a Navy ship during Vietnam.  As we looked at video of the World Trade Center towers on fire he said, “If it were a movie, you wouldn’t believe it could happen.”  We have, of course, seen this movie before, in different bits and pieces.  The Towering Inferno, combined with that film about a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl, or whatever that was.  We won’t be needing those movies anymore; not for a long time.

    People in the office, and later commentators on TV, draw the obvious parallels with Pearl Harbor.  The surprise attack.  The public’s – if not yet the government’s – immediate declaration that this is an act of war.  The early recriminations and finger-pointing about who failed to see this coming.  Pearl Harbor, of course, only – how can I say “only” – involved about three thousand killed, a number that will be far surpassed today.  If ten or twenty thousand are not dead in the rubble of the World Trade Center towers, and on the streets of Manhattan, it seems now that would be an incredible stroke of luck.  At this moment I fear the likely loss of life this day will be something this country has not seen since the worst days at the end of the Civil War. 

And then this:

   

    A hundred days have passed.  The City of New York has issued another revision of the total dead or still missing at the World Trade Center.  The latest revision has the number a bit under 3,000.

   This is incredible.  Incredible that this seems like good news, after all we have been through.  “Only” 3,000 were killed, when it seemed that thousands more must have perished that day.

   Incredible that – save for the people in the floors where the planes hit and above, where they never had a chance – nearly everyone must have gotten out.  A tribute to the buildings themselves, and of course to those four hundred firefighters who went in, many of them knowing what they were in for.

   Just a hundred days have passed.  And we have figured out that it was Osama Bin Laden and his Al Quaeda band that did this thing.  We have rallied our allies, or enough of them, gathered up our planes and bombs, gone to Afghanistan, and bombed the hell out of the Al Quaeda and the Taliban who harbored them.  The Taliban are deposed from power, the Al Quaeda forces retreated up into the mountains where they were pounded into quaking pockets of submission or death or flight into Pakistan, and Bin Laden himself – it seems – is likely dead.  All in a hundred days.

   Will this mighty message reach the conscious, rational mind of enough of these zealots to get them to leave us the hell alone?  We have sent the overwhelming right message, and in the right, deliberate, precise, methodical way:  Don’t fuck with us.  We got through, with a message like this, to Khadafi.  It can work. 

   It better work.

   

     And now here we are.  Nearly ten years later.  There has been no other attack like 9/11.   Not yet.  Bin Laden is dead.  And Khadafi?  It just so happens we are bombing his bunkers these days, and killed some of his family just last week in the process.  Not because he is attacking us – we cured him of that – but because he was killing his own people and threatening to kill many more.  

    It never ends.  But some days are better than others.