TO-WIT: SONNY BOYS
Despite the fervent yearnings of many of my colleagues to the contrary, I have indeed lasted long enough to reach the twilight of my career. It is a phase of my professional life both blessed and accursed: I have more knowledge inside my head than ever before but I don't always know where it is, and I have more answers than ever before provided you consider "huh" to be an answer.
But this stage of life has other blessings as well, six of them being my grandchildren. Quite recently one of those blessings climbed up onto my knee to ask me a question.
“What do you do for a living, Grumps,” he inquired, his face still aglow with a cherubic incandescence not yet eradicated by experience. (He calls me “Grumps,” don’t ask.)
Despite the ever increasing propensity of my memory to take leave of its senses, I instantly recalled that time, some forty years ago, when I had the exact same conversation with my own son. It went something like this:
“What do you do for a living, Daddy?”
"I'm a lawyer, son."
"What does a lawyer do, Daddy?"
"I help people get divorced, I help them sue other people over money and property, I help them get out of jail, I help them evict other people from their apartments, I help banks take customers’ homes away, things like that, son."
"Is that why no one will sit next to us in synagogue, Daddy?"
Oh, I would have loved it so if one or more of my children had wanted to become a lawyer, maybe even go into practice with me, but they did not. My son was particularly dead set against it, and I can’t help but wonder if by that early conversation I had kind of inadvertently soured him on the whole idea of lawyering. It had been after all a pretty grim narrative; truthful, yes, but grim.
And now, mirabile dictu, it seems as if I had been given a second chance. Maybe it wasn’t too late after all. Maybe all I needed for this grandchild to join me in practice was to craft a more tactful, alluring response - and to live fifteen years beyond the actuarial tables.
“I’m a lawyer,” I started, “like on tv.”
But before I could regale him with some glorious and instantly fabricated stories of valor, he went on.
“Do you know Judge Judy,” he asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“What about Judge Brown?”
“No.”
“What about Judge Wapner? Do you know him?”
“Nope,” I replied, sensing my opportunity
wane just like the passengers on the Titanic must have sensed their chances of rescue diminish.
“Have you ever been on tv, Grumps?”
“No,” I told him, “never,” and now there
was nary a life preserver in sight.
“Oh, too bad,” he offered, and with that
he precipitously scurried down my knee to head for his next, likely more fulfilling adventure.
I was certain I had lost him, but what happened next was nothing less than Divine professional intervention. He toddled right over to his Playtown set where he began with glee to repeatedly crash a dump truck into a crowd of pedestrians standing innocently on the sidewalk.
“Hey, kiddo,” I called out, hoping against hope, “got any lawyers in that there town of yours?”
He turned to me and smiled. OMG, there was still a chance.
©2014, S. Sponte, Esq.