TO-WIT: TABLE STAKES
As the crew hauled my mahogany library table out of my office, I could not stay. Though it was still early in the morning I felt this desperate need of some assistive libation and thus bid a hasty retreat for the nearest decaf grande cappuccino I could find.
As my years of practice draw to a close, and having no room for that magnificent table anywhere else, I had to let it go. Disposing of my desks and chairs and computers and credenzas and filing cabinets, that was easy; they were tools, nothing more, impassionate things wielded impassionately, but as for my table it was just not so. I’ve owned it for better than forty five years and more than any other professional possession it has been for me an exemplification of the highest standards of lawyering, a kind of ideal fixe if you will.
Though it has been purchased by an esteemed colleague who will treat it with the dignity and respect it both commands and deserves, its departure still leaves me with a considerable hole in my heart.
It was already quite old when I found it in a used furniture store the first year of my own practice. Though its varnish was all black and it was covered with yellow paint spots, I recognized it for what it was, an original Empire piece probably already 150 years old.
“You know this is an antique,” I told the store owner. He bit down hard on his half-smoked cigar and replied “I don’t sell antiques, kid, I sell used furniture.” I paid $100 for it and had it refinished, and since then it has always stood in the middle of my library/conference room, imposing, steadfast and dignified no matter what kind of tumult and chaos was happening around it.
Those qualities mean something to me because they’re the same qualities I’ve tried so hard to emulate as I have traipsed through my career. While I may have left some such footprints behind, there is to my regret an endless coterie of colleagues who can bear true witness to those occasions when my path may have veered somewhat slightly off course.
June, 1979 – “You know what your trouble is,” an irate and disgruntled client screamed at me across that table, “Hitler didn’t do a good enough job.” My stoic table never would have picked up the crystal ashtray sitting upon it and heaved it in the direction of that vile diatribe, and I would have no doubt been better served by doing likewise. It hit that old man in the shoulder, crystal knocking him down. Neither would my table have promised to urinate upon the old man’s grave. Oh that I had that kind of restraint.
November, 1983 – It was a grand case, testing whether this nation or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure naked women dancing before men and beer. During an interview in my conference room with a reporter querying me about a municipality’s attempt to shut my client down, I succumbed to my baser instincts and referred to both it and its counsel as idiots. For the first time in recent memory a reporter quoted me accurately, but had I followed the appropriate lead of my table in its unyielding ability to remain gracefully silent, I would have chosen elegance over truth and just shut up.
©2016, S. Sponte, Esq.