TO-WIT:
Man, I was tired. There I was, sitting in my favorite coffeehouse, the one I stop in most mornings on my way to work. It was already almost 10, my cappuccino had long since fizzled, my chin was resting flat on the table and I had no immediate intention of getting on with my day.
I’m not talking rough-night-before tired here. I’m talking globally tired, universally tired, bone-weary tired, and what I was tired of was lawyering. Thirty-one years is a damn long time to be pushing square-headed clients through justice’s round hole, especially since both of those parties are frequently unwilling participants, and I’m feeling quite burned out. In fact I often think these days of quitting the law, doing something else, anything else, or maybe nothing at all.
Oh, I know that lots of you have practiced law a lot longer than I have and that you just wish I would shut up and take it like a man. Well, just because you took it like a man doesn’t mean I have to. Besides, I did family law for a long time, and by my calculations, that took a good 10 years off my working life.
I would have been happy to spend the rest of my day in the coffeehouse, lost in my reverie and longing to be reunited with Gwyneth Paltrow, but two things mitigated against. First, the establishment wanted to set my table for lunch, and, second, I had a magistrate’s hearing to get to.
Now normally I don’t go to magistrate’s hearings anymore, at least not those run-of-the-mill landlord-tenant cases. Usually my young partner handles these matters. But this was a case that came to me as part of my participation in my local bar association’s pro bono program, and I couldn’t pass it off to her. It just wouldn’t have been right. Well, I mean I could have, but one of her kids was really, really sick that morning, inconsiderate little whelp, and she had stayed at home. So, with fate clearly aligned against me, off I went to the magistrate’s.
I knew before the case started that I would win. I knew that the client, a sad, lonely, obese young woman, living alone in a HUD-assisted apartment with four very young kids fathered by three different men, none of whom she had married – when I said she was lonely, I meant at the moment – could not be evicted because the landlord had not properly given her notice of the proceeding in accordance with the statute. Furthermore, she had already cured the breach of the lease by getting rid of her pet.
I had discussed the matter with her and had advised that, no, the “small domestic animals” permitted by the terms of the lease included neither her python nor the live rats she kept on hand as its snack.
The magistrate, luckily for me an experienced and professional one, agreed completely, and the hearing was over in minutes. Thereafter we were back out on the street and I prepared to depart. Suddenly my portly client, heretofore rather morose, became quite animated. She smiled, she laughed, she shed a tear, she squealed, “I am so happy,” and then leapt through the air at me bearing an incipient hug. At that moment my sense of self-preservation took over, and I instinctively side-stepped her as one would sidestep an onrushing bus. Good thing too, for the portion of the sidewalk she shattered upon landing could have been one of my cervical vertebras.
“Thank you so much,” she said, wrapping her abundant arms around my neck, “I though I would have to move. Now I don’t. No one has ever done anything like this for me before. They said you were the best lawyer in the whole wide world. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
The best lawyer in the world, huh? I couldn’t let that pass. I asked who it was that had told her I was the best lawyer in the world.
“Some guy in the checkout line at the supermarket. I don’t know his name, but he said he knew who you were, you one time represented his third ex-wife’s former brother-in-law and that you were the best lawyer in the world.”
We parted then, each going our respective ways, me to the office, she to Wendy’s for a mid-morning pick me up, now that they accept food stamps. But as I drove back, my malaise began to lift. In fact, I began to feel pretty good. It had been so long since I had done such a hearing that I had forgotten how many really downtrodden folk there are out there whose lives, when infused with just the slightest act of kindness, take on, however briefly, a luster, a glow, a faint glimmer of hope, and how good it feels to be a part of that process.
OK, so I’m tired a lot these days, and OK, so I don’t sleep as well as I used to. But cases like these remind me why I wanted to be a lawyer and why I’m not quite ready to quit after all. I mean, what would all those people out there do without the best lawyer in the whole wide world?
©2001, S. Sponte, Esq.