TO-WIT: FULL OF IT
“Give it to me straight, Doc,” I said, “I can take it.” Of course we both knew I was lying, but in this, as in all of my medical relationships, mutual pretense is a fundamental requisite. That’s why I always tell him I’m glad to see him and that’s why he always tells me I look thinner.
Truth is I hadn’t been feeling great lately, nothing I could put my finger on or aim it at, but the thought of going to the office every day, nay, just the notion of leaving the house in the morning, had become increasingly more onerous. Yet again putting on the daily armor of litigiousness, yet again hoisting the professional lance of evisceration, yet again thrusting with the licensed sword of slaughter in pursuit of the ruination of other people’s lives and fortunes, well, it just didn’t seem like that much fun anymore.
My doctor removed the stethoscope from my nether regions, pushed his eyeglasses up onto his forehead and looked directly into my eyes. “How long is it now that you’ve a lawyer?”
“Forty-six years,” I replied, repeating it again a bit more slowly, “forty-six years,” as if duplication fortified the feeling that lately it seems more like twice that long.
He nodded his head sagaciously. “I think you’re full of it,” he said.
“Of course,” I replied, “I’m a lawyer.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he answered. “Look it, everybody’s innerness has a finite capacity. It differs from person to person but when the detritus of our work fills up our innerness we’re done, there’s no more room for any of it. I think that’s what’s happened to you; you’re just full of it.”
Like many truths it was hard to hear. After spending almost half a professional century awash in a world that chronically weeps for fairness, a world endlessly in want of my congenital abundance of large hankies, I can’t imagine being done.
As with so many appellate court decisions that have come my way, I yearned for a second opinion. So I sought out my old friend Professor Chaim Dunn, director of the Custer Institute Of Career Crises. If anyone would know something about this he would. I explained my situation and, alas, he was very blunt. “If you don’t know when to quit” he admonished, “you could get slaughtered.”
The truth is I’m not the lawyer I used to be. I don’t enjoy it as much and as a concomitant truth I don’t do it as well. Perhaps I’ve spent too many years doing the research, the pleadings and motions, attending endlessly boring depositions, defending relentlessly worthless preliminary objections or summary judgment motions, and perhaps, yes, I’m just full of it. I may not be as good as I once was but sadly, poignantly, I’m still good enough to know it, and that more than anything else presages the decision.
When I was a little boy I used to tie a kitchen towel around my neck as a cape and endlessly leap from the side porch. Every time I expected to soar, in aid of those in need of aid, and every time I never expected to land in the briar bushes below. That every time I did though wasn’t daunting enough to keep me from being a lawyer. Its been the best way I could figure out how to soar, at least once in a while, and for that I will be endlessly grateful.
So while I’ll continue to work some, it really is someone else’s turn now at hero-hood. If you’re interested, give me a call. I still know villainy when I see it, my vocabulary remains virulently ripe, and I know for sure that I have a cache of those kitchen towels still around here somewhere.
©2016, S. Sponte, Esq.