TO-WIT: WAITING FOR GROUNDHOG DAY
As time continues to speed away from me like a galaxy in flight from the center of the cosmos, my thoughts are with rodents, and not just any rodent, mind you, but one rodent in particular. Please don’t jump to any conclusions here, this is not about you.
The rodent I’m thinking of comes from one of my all-time favorite movies, Groundhog Day, the movie in which Bill Murray portrays an ego-centric, slovenly, crude weatherman from Pittsburgh, begrudgingly on his way to Punxsutawney for the umpteenth time to pay homage to a groundhog. There he gets trapped in a time warp and relives the same day over and over and over again until he finally figures out how to be a decent human being and treat other people with love, courtesy and respect.
While trapped there, he learns to play the piano, to administer the Heimlich maneuver in an emergency, he saves a homeless old man from freezing to death, and he eventually receives the love of all the townspeople in return for his many acts of kindness. Then, and only then, can he move on to the next day of his life, taking all of his newly acquired skills with him.
Strangely enough though, throughout the whole movie Bill Murray wants nothing more than to get out of his predicament. Oh, those show folk! It never occurs to him that he’s been presented with a chance that most people, and me in particular, would kill for – the chance to halt Time’s constant dance of subtraction just long enough to make things right. That, to me, is the point of the movie, and for those of us who practice law, it’s a pretty poignant point at that.
Just think of it; I mean, how many times in your career have you thought “Ooooh, can I have a do-over?” With another chance, you might have remembered to file that lawsuit before the applicable statute of limitations expired, you might not have laughed out loud when your 350 pound, alcoholic, cross-dressing client with the seven long-haired, un-housebroken Chihuahuas asks you why his wife left him, and you might for once in your career support a judicial candidate who ends up actually winning the election.
Well, forget it. There are no do-overs in the practice of law, there are only malpractice suits, and while that might be all well and dandy for the client it isn’t such an appealing outcome for us.
Oh, but if we each had our own Groundhog Day, even only once, just once, wouldn’t that be ever so peachy keen? And I bet every one of us has at least one Groundhog Day moment that we’d like another shot at, don’t we?
It was quite early in my practice when I got a call from the President Judge. In those days, court appointments to indigent juvenile hearings were one of the things that the P.J. passed out to all the young lawyers to help them pay the rent. I had no experience in juvenile matters, but insofar as the system was concerned that didn’t matter. These kids’ lives were already in the toilet, and since the outcomes of these hearings were all pretty much preordained, the inevitable missteps and mistakes of young lawyers would all be pretty much harmless.
The kid’s name was Dennis. His parents had abandoned him years ago so they could finish puberty unencumbered. Dennis had been left to the care of his elderly grandmother. She tried as best she could, but she could never figure out why he was so angry all the time, and she eventually gave up, leaving him to carom from one foster home to another.
By the time I was appointed to represent him, he was about fifteen and had already stored up enough joules of kinetic anger to power Seattle for a month. My job was to convince the Judge that a kid who cut his foster mother with a six-inch switchblade was merely deprived, not delinquent. It went about as well as could be expected, and when the hearing was over, Dennis was declared deprived and thus eligible for continued placement in foster care instead of juvenile detention.
What a wonderful break for the kid, you betcha’. Even Judge commended me on my effort, and as Dennis was taken away, I handed him my card. “Call me if you need me,” I told him as I shook his hand. He stuck the card in his wallet and was gone.
Maybe two years later, I got a call from Juvenile Court. Dennis had done the knife thing again and had been taken back into detention. I got the assault charges dropped but could not evade the court’s opinion that this time he was delinquent. He was thus sent to a state juvenile detention center, a/k/a “kid jail,” and as he left, I again handed him my card. “Call me if you need me, Dennis,” I told him as he was led away.
Again, about two years later, I got another call, this time from him. Now an adult, he had moved on to adult crimes, he had been arrested, and was calling me from jail to come see him. I’d never done any criminal law, so I told him to call the Public Defender and wished him well. The next day a jailer found him in his cell hanging from his belt. He was wearing only blue jeans, and the only thing in his pocket was my card. He was eighteen. I read about it in the local paper.
That was a long time ago, but I still think about Dennis from time to time, and boy, that’s one diem I would sure love to carpe again. I don’t know what I might do differently, but it would be something, maybe just go see him, and who knows, maybe it would have helped, and maybe there would have been a happy ending.
I know what you’re thinking, that happy endings only occur in movies, and maybe you’re right. But still, I’m a sucker for them, I believe in them, I yearn for them. Psychotic, yeah, maybe it is, but come on, you have to believe. I mean. how the hell else could you practice law?
© 1998, 2019, S. Sponte, Esq.