Goodbye

From time to time I think back to my early years in law practice. As I am sitting here conducting administrative law hearings I see a variety of lawyers and a variety of skill levels. When I see the struggling newbies I am reminded of myself of me as I started out. When I see the experienced and practiced professional smoothly handle a case I think back to the first law firm I worked at as a lawyer.

For 14 years I was part of Farhat, Tyler and Associates. Farhat, Joe Farhat was indelibly memorable. What I remember most about Joe was the intensity he brought to everything. He was demanding, he was calculating and he wanted to win. He wanted to win in negotiations. He wanted to win in the courtroom. He wanted to win in even the simplest of social exchanges..

Joe never wanted to be unprepared or surprised. He demanded we be prepared before walking into a motion. He wanted each and every nuance of what could blow up to be picked apart beforehand. Why? Well because he wanted to be the one left standing after the battle. Most of the time we prevailed. If we had been a hockey team we would have made the playoffs just about every year. Most of the time Joe the coach, the master of the team, was able to see the bigger picture. Joe got the lay of the whole chessboard..

Working to win, and you have to work to win when your name is on the door requires focus and aggression. Working to win requires an instinctual lightness like a boxer floating at the edge of the ring just waiting to deliver the KO punch. And the KO punch has got to be there. Most of the time the punches he threw, the punches we threw as a firm, landed solidly..

Watching Joe work was a master’s class in how to manage a litigation practice in a small firm. Watching him work new clients was a master’s class in how to sustain a steady stream of business. Watching Joe watching the world around him was a lesson in mental acuity. .

I didn’t always like what I went through working for Joe for he was a hard taskmaster. But I don’t think I would have had the career I have now without that training. He left too soon, far too soon.

Richard Thompson *

On this Friday morning I am taking some time off from chores to import music onto my computer’s hard drive. Even with my hearing dissipating I still love music. Picking choices is sometimes easy and sometimes not.

As I was going through my collection I noticed the large selection of Richard Thompson CDs that were stacked up there. No hesitation some of these are going on the old hard drive.

I discovered Richard Thompson when I was 16 years old and listening to the radio in the metro Philadelphia area. Michael Tearson now of Sirius XM was a big fan as was Luke O’Reilly. These disc jockeys played songs like Matty Groves and Sloth repeatedly.

To be 16 and hear Matty Groves a variant of Child Ballad #81 all electrified and just so freakin’ full of energy was transformative. It turned me from someone who listened with music in the background as I washed the dishes to a fanatic who wanted to both hear those ringing guitars loud and to ferret out the nuance of every lyric. Richard Thompson was not long for the band but while he was there oh how it soared.

As I departed the east coast and headed to the heartland for college I kept up with Richard’s music. I bought various Sandy Denny and Ian Matthews efforts on which Richard played his unmistakable electric lead guitar in the background. I picked up solo albums and albums he did with his wife. “I Want to See the Bright Lights” tonight was amazing.

As his marriage dissolved I grabbed a copy of “Shoot Out the Lights.” To this day it is one of my most favorite albums ever. The pain, the passion, the rage that played out in that studio and found its way onto the LP made for transcendent listening.

Richard is aging as we all are. I don’t know how much longer he will be touring. If you get a chance I urge you to go and see him especially if he is performing and acoustic show near you.

The Prayer of Mere Existence

Friday morning. I took today off. My thought had been to escape for the weekend. Alas that will not happen. Others have exams, exams to prepare for and demonstrations to oversee. This leaves me home and I think I shall turn inward.

In the mundane there rests a divinity true and profound. With each chore we perform of cleansing, cooking, arranging and planning for day to day living we engage a spiritual dimension. In our acts of putting food together and of making the bed we join with millions of others in rituals of life. These repetitive practices are prayers to our existence. Things like hanging linens out to dry and scrubbing the knives are acts that imply we have faith that we are moving forward.

Looking out the window I see my neighbors grass is vibrant and verdantly green. It almost glows in the gorgeous light of morning. Tomorrow my neighbor or my neighbor’s child will mow that lawn. From putting the gasoline in the mower to checking the oil to walking the yard to pick up sticks and rocks the process is a meditation on the continuation of life.

We forget these are prayers and we most certainly confuse them with burdens. To be alive is to be in contemplation of the greater things.

An Unruly Mind

Real talent comes with a curse. For those who are playing the glass bead game of the mind and doing it on the fly the responsibly of conducting the background work seems like just so much bother.

As to me I was not really talented but I was impacted by this mental laziness. When I was young book learning came easily to me. Other things did not. Learning how to do home repair or how to show respect and kindness to people was elusive. But the early 1960s was an era where the path from elementary school to college was valued. I flourished more than most in class because my memory at that time was a steel trap. The problem came in when I got to university and I had to learn to study. It took time but I got it. I got it eventually.

My youngest whose video is posted on this space is very similar to me in that way. He is genuinely nicer than I was at his age. He can grasp things on the fly with an amazing deftness. But he struggles with discipline. To sit and pour over a book is not in his wheelhouse. He is all about picking up the highlights but he almost refuses to drill down to the depths of the material. It is so frustrating to me to watch this. He could be great but on paper he looks average.

He will come to the place he was meant to be. I am sure of that.

Doors

Some days it is hard to push through the door. Pushing the door outward on a cold drear day in midwinter is very hard. Biting wind and those stinging bits of ice or sleet that will pelt your face make that rightward twisting of the doorknob difficult, so very damn difficult. But you got to be ten miles from here in twenty minutes.

On a sunny day it is hard to twist the knob from the other side. Daffodils explode yellow from the ground. Birds engage in a call and response so enticing you don’t want to go in. Awake and aware in nature’s cathedral the urge to linger is so very strong. The light, the warm light, so fills the mind. Rays falling randomly are driving away the petty annoyances. Bills and flyers will remain on your table and desk long after dusk has come and passed. Leaving that door closed is so easy as you sit back in an old wrought iron chair in the garden.

We are all the same. When you come to a door you make an evaluation. Is it in or out? Your mental process either happens quickly or it can take minutes, hours or months. Asking a girl out for that first date by knocking on her dormitory room door requires you have a plan in mind. You had better be able to explain why you were there on her floor by her memo board if you lose your nerve.

On those other occasions when you heard the harmonies of voices and the strumming of guitars inside a pub your active thought does not even enter the process. It like the two old compatriots driving north and the one asleep in the backseat asks as he awakens, “Where are we?” The driver says “We are passing Spike’s Keg O’ Nails Tap.” The passenger sitting up asks, “Why?” Some doors open just that easily; there is no question and there is no hesitation.

On occasion interior doors leading to spaces that we have chosen to walk away from for months or years haunt us. It might be the office of a deceased spouse up on the second floor of the house. It might be the bedroom door for a child that had passed too soon, any child passing goes too soon. Maybe it leads into the junk room where the projects and parts of things to be completed (and the broken things) migrate. Standing in front of those doors especially places where the sense of another lingers can be very hard indeed.

In our lives we will open hundreds if not thousands of doors manually or by stepping on a mat triggering an automated arm. We may hit a brass circle with an icon that tells us this place is accessible for the differentially abled. With joy we will open doors. With hesitation we will open doors. With anticipation we will open doors. With trepidation and sorrow we will open doors.

Warm Day Cold Missouri Waters

April 17, 2015

My hope was that today would be a productive day.  Having previewed my work most of my cases are what you would call relatively challenging.  These are people with long term arrest histories and years of daily alcohol and/or drug use.  I also have to polish up what I wrote yesterday and then field phone calls and complaints.  You don’t tell people “no” without having to take a few calls and review some older materials.  So far the slogging is slow.  Two orders are just partially completed..

At the end of the day I want to go see a small folk concert with my youngest son.  There are three performers calling themselves the Men of Words.  The only one of them I am passingly familiar with is the gent who wrote “Cold Missouri Waters” about the Mann Gulch disaster.  I have heard some of his other songs on the Pandora Stan Rogers station.  At least he should be good but often on these three way bills you come across a gem you didn’t know about before. Here is to discovery.

The radio this morning said it was going to go up to 23 today.  Yeah I use my phone to stream the Toronto CBC morning feed to the big assed blue tooth speaker in the kitchen.  I know 23 is warm and my guess is that it mean the lower 70s.  I tried to look up the simple cheat sheet formula for this but my computer hung up on the search. One of these days I will learn the conversion formula. The ride in was clear and the sun was bright.

I am not going to dwell on bigger ideas today.  Monday is my last birthday that I will acknowledge.  As I wrap my head around that I will probably go running to the quotes and to the volumes of the great thinkers.  Today I am just looking forward to lunch with my wife and son.

Fixing the Toliet that Flowed into the Eternal

As I sometimes do when I am once again home from a day of work I settled down this evening to read a short piece from the New York Times.  Often at the end of my labor I cannot face the horrific headlines about beheadings in the name of God or of our need to purge the slackers from the public dole.  Tonight then my ink on paper diversion was a tiny item on the front page A tale of a building improvement caught my attention.  

How this tale hit the front page I don’t know.  Sometimes the Times surprises me with an odd choice for the pricey front page real estate. This tale was about a man in Rome who simply wanted to fix his toilet.  When he dispatched his handy person sons to set about the task tracing the sewer blockage their labors led to the discovery of a roman granary and a Franciscan chapel. The discoveries have yet to cease.

My eye was pulled to this tale because a couple of weeks ago I had found myself listening to a tale on the CBC about trying to build a subway stop in Rome.  With each new shovel of dirt some amazing archeological find presented itself until they just gave up on building the stop.  The author of that story went further chasing deep into streets that lie beneath the city that were laid out in the 3^rd century. She visited ancient Roman baths and various art works that are only seen by a very few.

So much of our lives are built unknowingly atop the abandoned worlds of others.  People who lived and died with purpose are now totally gone from the memories of all the living and their names are recorded in no books.  By now their bodies are not dust, they are loam or muck. The air they drew into their lungs those many years ago we now draw into our lungs.  Lives lived short or long they are gone, gone and forgotten.

In a thousand years this orb may contain nothing that resembles life.  Or maybe a plague with have winnowed humankind down to a manageable number where the threats of earth’s other inhabitants will again be real to us.  Maybe some birds will come back and the polar bears will have ice to frolic on. But in any case the words I write and the life I live will mean nothing to whoever or whatever might remain.  I will be but a layer that will be built upon.  I might be part of a raised bed of heirloom tomatoes.

Don’t take this as despair.  Take it instead as a call to make life better now.  Give love to those around you.  Offer forgiveness whenever it is possible.  Help. Act.  Do the next right thing.  We get so little time here on this orb and either literally or figuratively what we do and who we are will be built upon by others (I am hopeful that the planet will  have life for a long time). Knowing that we are staring communally into a void act as if choices matter.