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Southern Mother At Large in California or You have a WHAT in that Suitcase?

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In the end, I drifted up the road from Richmond to another, smaller firm in Washington, D.C. where my creative bent found a home. Not long after I arrived at New Firm, the Most Important Partner came into my office one day to congratulate me on a memo I had written for him that the Florida Legislature had then adopted at a statute for the benefit of one of the firm’s clients. He was a very happy Most Important Partner. The client was a Very Happy Important Big Bucks Client. And the firm sure could bill for that one! Redeemed at last.
But finding a home as a lawyer wasn’t as fulfilling as I had thought it would be. It was all still paper and stale conference rooms and working trips on air planes. And business suits, starched shirts, and floppy bows. So I struck out for California (on an airplane, not in a covered wagon) and motherhood.
By 1991, I had three children, ages five, three, and newborn. I had hired a college girl as afternoon help three days a week because I just could not keep up with the demands of the mother job, which was a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week affair. I had no family to give me a break. Babysitters didn’t want three kids or a newborn. And the kids’ dad had parked us in a ritzy part of town where moms had Hispanic nannies. (And went back to Work. To avoid the tough job of Mother, I was convinced.) So no one needed a Mothers’ Day Out Program. (Except me, apparently.)
Mothering, I soon discovered, was an endlessly creative job. My artistic self smocked tiny dresses for my daughter, rompers for the boys. I marched clowns and balloons, cupcakes, and teddy bears across their tummies. I looped ribbon into “frou frous” and sewed them onto my daughter’s dresses and hats. I made tiny linen and velvet suits and vests for the boys. I made doll wardrobes and Halloween costumes. (Think my daughter as Pooh and my first son as Piglet when I was pregnant with Number Three.) I made matching velveteen mother-daughter-son outfits for Christmas. And I used a gallon milk jug and fake fur to create a dead wringer for a Coldstream Guards hat. (For my daughter, not the two boys.)
Of course, this activity was not a California Mother Thing at all. California Mothers (the ones without nannies) wore yoga pants and stuffed their children into knit rompers from Mervyns and Gymboree. My activities were so unusual that I had to smuggle a “pleater,” the device consisting of rows of tiny needles that prepares fabric for smocking, back from Tennessee in my suitcase. I ordered smocking patterns and laces and tiny French hand sewing needles from Georgia and Florida and Virginia and Texas.
And naturally I didn’t send my California children to school in these artworks that only a Southern Mother could love. No, as soon as my daughter could pull the OshKoshs off the hangers and put them on, one leg at a time, the dresses hung in the closet quietly waiting for Sunday, like the Good Girls they were.
But, of course, Sunday came. And again, I behaved as a Southern Mother would. CHURCH. Being Episcopalian, we had no duty (Thank, God) to proselytize the California Mothers and their offspring. I could quietly dress my little ones in their smocked and French handsewn best and shuffle us all off to Sunday School (which, true to Southern Mother Form I taught) and CHURCH. (Where I provided stickers and crayons and paper and tiny coloring books to keep the small troops quiet through the boring (to them and sometimes to me, true confessions) service. One interesting Sunday, my small daughter pointed out we were almost the only people there under fifty. Everyone else was at BRUNCH in their yoga pants and knit rompers, California Style.
But I was a Southern Mother. I didn’t know any better.
Being creative as a mother wasn’t just about their clothes. No, it was far deeper and more fun and more substantive than that. Southerners love stories and are born storytellers. I told stories about the South and about their grandfather the FBI agent and their great-great-grandfather the Civil War solider (for the Union!). I read and read and read and read. We loved Thomas the Tank Engine (we called him “Thomas Tanken”), Madeline, Good Night Moon, the Runaway Bunny, Winnie the Pooh, any alphabet book ever written, and all forms of Nursery Rhymes. We watched Sesame Street, talked about “Bee Bo,” “Oscar the Grouch,” “Cookie Monster” and “Count One Count.” (My daughter’s name for him which I thought much better than the original.)
We went to Disney moves, although my daughter wisely decided she did not want to be a Disney princess like her California counterparts, who would ditch their knit rompers for princess gowns, tiaras, and scepters to wear to the park. My daughter, on the other hand, put on her Coldstream Guards costume for outings and marched beside her little brothers’ stroller.
We ate fish sticks and tater tots for supper with plenty of ketchup. We had pillow fights and said prayers at bedtime. (Always the Lord’s Prayer because Now I Lay Me had terrified me as a child because it talked about dying.) We waded in the Pacific on days that never seemed to end because of the stifling heat. (The kids’ dad, who worked in air conditioned comfort, said we didn’t need to be cool.) And we promised every time that we wouldn’t go in the water in our clothes. But we always did. In short, the four of us laughed and created and played and had fun, Southern Mother style, in the foreign country of California. We made few friends, although we tried. But we had each other.

Somewhat skimpy ribbon frou frou on dress


Bee Bo!

Thomas Tanken!

A Smocked dress


Her costume looked like this!


 

A pleater.


 

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

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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.

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

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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!!!! 

More Baby Lawyer Adventures or Death by Courtroom

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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

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

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

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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.

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

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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?
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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.
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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.

More Adventures of Elvis the Conch Shell or Argument, What is It Good For?

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Last week, I told you about Elvis the conch shell living in my ear. The doctor called Elvis an ear infection, but – as I told you last week – I know the sound of the sea when I hear it. Anyway, Elvis has mostly left my ear, but likes to come back every morning to check the fit of his jumpsuit before he heads for Vegas. Annoying, but better than having him full time in my ear. Bye, bye, Elvis. Leave the building for good. Thanks.
Now, as I told you last week, according to Louise Hay, whom I admire, Elvis took up residence in my ear because of the presence of arguing in my life. And, as I was quick to conclude, she can’t be right because my three children have grown up and found their own nests. And we didn’t argue much, anyway, when they lived here. And I can’t argue with my two Golden Retrievers. I mean, I could try; but they’d only lick me and love me to death in response. So it wouldn’t work.
But then I remembered what I do for a living. Truth to tell, I’m a professional arguer. My work life is just one big argument. Still, that doesn’t seem like the kind of raucous noise that would invite Elvis in. In fact, my job is largely silent, except for keyboard keys clicking.
So what do I do for a living? Well, when I meet people, I often say I’m a legal writer. That’s closer to the truth than saying, “I’m a lawyer” like the irritating guy at the end of “TMZ” every night. But I am an attorney, licensed in no less than two states and the District of Columbia. Conclusion: this chick is good at bar exams.
I’m an appellate attorney which means you have to be a bona fide loser to meet me. Sorry clients. You know who you are. If you lose your case in the trial court because your flashy flamboyant trial attorney failed to charm the jury, I am the next stop on your legal “to do” list.
Now, while I admit to a preference for flashy and flamboyant in my personal wardrobe, my work wardrobe is one black suit which I wear to the court of appeal once every two or three years for oral argument. (Although next time, I swear, I’m wearing the red suit and six inch heels.) The rest of the time, I sit at my computer surrounded by Goldens, writing scholarly, unbrief “briefs.” And these tomes of legal wisdom, gentle readers, are my “arguments.” I tell the court of appeal in polite terms how the trial court screwed the pooch and why my client simply must have a new trial. I put these gems of legal scholarship between Gamma green cardstock covers and ship them off to the court of appeal by FedEx ground. Each one is a fascinating, page-turning tale of legal woe. But the clerk of the court NEVER calls to say, WHAT A GREAT READ! (Although the guy at FedEx who copies, binds, and reads them, sees my potential as a fiction writer.) No, the clerk only calls when I forgot to sign some tacky service page. SIGH!
Several months after I launch my green guided missel into the office of opposing counsel, he or she fires back his or her own lemon-yellow hand grenade, asserting the trial court was brilliant in every way and made not one single mistake in the entire month-long trial. In fact, according to opposing counsel, His Honor is an unbiased saint, and twelve smarter, unbiased jurors could not possibly have been found on the planet. Appellant is just the sorest of losers. Twenty days later, I lob back a chicly neutral Bristol-tan reply brief that says, ever so politely, opposing counsel clearly graduated dead last in his class. He or she does not know what he is talking about.
After that, sometimes I put on my suit, go to court, and stand behind the too-high-for-short-people podium for an oral argument that lasts all of fifteen minutes. But rarely. I mean, after all that writing, who has anything new to say? And the court of appeal will offer to lynch me if I bore them with what I’ve already said.
So, upon reflection, I do have argument in my life. But not the loud kind that would invite Elvis for a week-long sleepover in my ear under Louise Hay’s view of the Universe.
While the stately, professional arguing I do for a living has a purpose – it lets disappointed litigants air their grievances in a safe, controlled environment which is kind of like releasing compressed air to clean a keyboard – I don’t have much use for argument in my personal life. Maybe that’s because I got “argued out” as a child. My parents went at it 24/7. They saw each other – or one of us – and automatically launched an attack. No wonder I grew up thinking being a champion arguer was a badge of honor. Not to mention survival. But no one ever persuaded anyone to change his or her mind. It was all just word bullets fired into our most vulnerable emotional places.
So when my own three children entered my life, I couldn’t bring myself to surround them with the hurtful, constant criticism and argument that was the only way my parents could relate to their children. I mean, when you love someone with all your heart, do you really care if they turned over their soda by accident or forgot to put the toilet seat down, or wanted an extra cookie? (Who doesn’t want an extra cookie?) Looking back, the stuff my parents thought was make or break makes me laugh because it wasn’t all that important. For example, one of my father’s favorite rants was I’d never graduate from any school whatsoever because I couldn’t spell. (Didn’t anyone tell him how English got its spelling rules? Printer’s misspellings!) But enter spell check! And I have three (count them three) post graduate degrees. Cum laude. Guess I showed him I could graduate. Over and over and over again.
But the most interesting thing about arguing is that when I let go of the rope and fail to respond, my opponent has no ammunition to continue the fight. Really, it is the funniest thing to watch in the whole world. Try it. You will die laughing inside when tough guy stares at you with nothing else to say. It is so much fun, you won’t even be tempted to argue back. Silence has enormous power.  Said by a professional arguer!

Wanting Elvis to Leave the Building – Or Why is a Conch Shell in My Ear?

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For a week or more, I have had a conch shell in my right ear. The doctor called it an ear infection and said the ear is blocked with fluid, but I know the sound of the sea in a conch shell when I hear it. Sorry doc.
Now the sound of the sea is romantic. But with a conch shell I can put it down when I’ve had enough romance and use my ear for other things. But having an actual conch shell living in my ear is not working out. Do you know how hard it is to practice clarinet with just one good ear? (Ok, never mind that I still play sharp with two good ears. Working on it.)
So this thing has to go. And soon. There are a number of theories about how to remove the conch shell. The doc favors antibiotics. Only problem: who decided all antibiotic pills have to be the actual diameter of my throat? Choking to death is not an option for getting well. So just like any pediatric victim of an ear infection, I have a brown bottle of cherry flavored liquid and a squirting teaspoon dispenser. So far the results from option one are not stellar.
Option two. Holistic healing. Being a fan of Louise Hay, when some part of my otherwise reliable physical self is on the blink, I run for You Can Heal Your Life. I admit to loving the entire story of this book. Overcoming the odds and optimism. And I met Ms. Hay once in person and was totally charmed. But, the truth is, the chart in the back of symptoms and affirmations is a hypochondriac’s dream. (Don’t I wish the conch shell in my ear were just hypochondria. I’d have it out of there in a heart beat. Or thought beat, I guess.) (Notice cool use of the subjunctive to demonstrate the conch is not hypochondria. Only English majors even remember what a subjunctive is.)
Anyway, according to the chart, I developed this annoying symptom, not to romance the sea in my ear, but because I am “Angry. Not wanting to hear. Too much turmoil and my parents are arguing.” Well, if I am angry, I have no idea why. I do want to hear. Any yes, my parents were champion arguers but one of them has been dead for more than thirty years, and I haven’t lived with the other one for even longer.  Granted she is probably is still arguing alone,  but I can’t hear her with either ear.
But a good affirmation or two can’t hurt. So I am chanting, “Harmony surrounds me. I listen with love to the pleasant and the good. I am a center for love.” I like the last one, a lot. And after chanting these at least once, the conch vanished for about three minutes. Really. Like Elvis, it left the building. But not for long. So now I am an antibiotic swigging, chanting host to a conch shell in my ear. Perks: cherry taste of the med, and feeling good when I say “I am a center for love.” Downside: well, we know that one.
Option three. The Abraham-Hicks approach: that which you dwell on gets bigger. So DON’T THINK ABOUT IT. Kind of difficult when you are trying to HEAR, but I’m game.
Option four and final option for now: Go fill up the bathroom with steam from the shower and breath it to open my sinuses and hopefully, my ear.  Hey, it’s pleasant, harmless, and tasteless, and I can chant while I don’t think about the ocean roaring in my ear! And I can light the lavender candle to banish the anger I didn’t know I had. (Still skeptical about that one.) Will let you know when Elvis leaves the building for good.
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Change – The Zone of Discomfort

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Several years ago, my youngest child headed off to college, and I was left to contemplate the change in my life now that all three of my children were away at school. Right away, I noticed that the word “change” was like a prism with many sides, refracting life instead of light in multiple directions. The more I thought about “change” the more I realized I didn’t really understand what it meant. Oh, I got understood the kind of “change” that outside forces compress onto our lives. Time is an example. Time had grown up my children and changed them into adults who didn’t live at home any more. I hadn’t asked for that “change” or attempted to create it, but it arrived on its own, nonetheless. And I accepted it cheerfully and asked, “What’s next?”
But “what’s next” appeared to have more to do with me than the outside force of “change” that had created my empty nest. The change that time brought by giving me adults in place of children was not going to also bring a new goal and a new meaning into my life. I had to make that “change” happen myself. And that’s when I realized how many times I had set off on the road of “change,” and nothing happened. Why? I’m a very disciplined person. Multiple graduate degrees, and I run my own business. Surely I knew how to create “change” when I wanted to. But the truth was, I didn’t. The word “change” was an empty box I didn’t know how to fill up with meaning. So I began an experiment to understand the nature of the “change” that starts inside and eventually manifests in the outer world. Or at least is expected to manifest in the outer world.
I have studied clarinet most of my life, and I am always trying to be a better musician; so this looked like a fertile area to study the nature of “change.” I had long needed to make some “changes” in the position of my jaw, lips and teeth on the mouthpiece. In musical terms, my embouchure needed to “change.” So one day, I sat with the instrument and repositioned everything the way my teacher had been telling me to do for some time. The new way I was holding the mouthpiece in my mouth felt awkward and uncomfortable, but I was sure I’d have a fabulous, deep clarinet sound the moment I pushed air through this new set up. But I didn’t! In fact, I sounded the way I had on the very first day I had picked up the horn, too many years ago to count. So, automatically, I shifted back to the old embouchure, and then realized why I didn’t know what “change” was. “Change” involved sticking with discomfort. If I wanted to be a better player, I’d have to keep doing this new embouchure over and over until it became comfortable, and until it gave me the results I was seeking. If I didn’t want to get better, I could just stay with the old way and avoid “change.” And then I knew why I hadn’t really understood the meaning of “change” from within because as soon as a”change” I was trying to make became uncomfortable, I’d slip right back into the old way, often without even noticing. I had thought I was “changing” but I wasn’t.
Since that moment of enlightenment, I have put my theory of the meaning of “change” to lots of different tests. And sure enough, the moment I apply myself to a “change” I want to create, I immediately encounter the “Zone of Discomfort.” But now I’m prepared for it; and, if it is a “change” I really want to bring about, I stay in the zone until I’ve gotten my results, and I’ve created the “change” I wanted to create. Knowing that I need to prepare for the rocky start that “change” brings with it, helps me focus on getting the results I’m seeking. And it also helps me evaluate whether a proposed “change” is one I truly want to bring about. Sometimes I try new things and learn they are not for me. Going back to the old way is just fine. But functioning from my new understanding of how to cause change from within has enriched my journey and allowed me to put meaning into the empty box of that used to be the word “change.” More about the journey of change and setting new goals next time.