Some people never find it
Some only pretend, but me?
I just want to live happily ever after
Every now and then
-Jimmy Buffett
Years ago I was a young law student, giddy and insecure at being recruited by law firms populated with folks far smarter than I figured to be.
My "callback" trips were almost entirely in Atlanta, staying in glitsy hotels with stunning views of the skyline of the Empire City of the South. But one callback was here, in Panama City, where I'm sitting right now as I write this. It's thundering out there, with flashes of lightning across a bay I've known not as long as my friends who grew up here, but for most of my life as I look back on it now.
Unlike the Atlanta big firm callbacks, this one was a little less formal, a little less committed to the notion that they actually wanted me here. Playing hard to get, I guess.
"If you're in town one weekend, we'd love to meet you and get together."
I was, and we did. The dinner party was at the home of a lawyer who became a trusted mentor and friend later, a sprawling place on a bluff sloping down through live oaks to the bayou where he kept his wooden trawler tied up behind the house. The dinner crowd was smart, irreverent in that way I can't explain to Yankees, comfortable in their own skin. All accomplished as lawyers, all with beautiful families and lives that would be the envy of most partners at King & Spalding in Atlanta. And with exactly the same academic and professional bona fides. A chance to practice with folks as smart as anyone up there, without having to live up there.
Yes please.
Almost thirty years later I sit here at 407, look out across the bay where I taught the boys how to fish, fell in love with Peggy, and abided on weekday evenings with friends who are still family to me. We get each other, can finish each other's stories half the time, don't bother hiding our flaws.
"Remember the time_____ got drunk and tried to bite ______'s ear off?"
Hilarious.
"Remember when ______ forgot to set the park brake on his fancy new pickup and it rolled back into the bay as he was trying to trailer his fancy new boat, only to watch the fancy new boat drift into the bay when he ran back up the dock and jumped into the cab then realized he'd forgotten to tie off the boat?"
These things actually happened. My friends up north, whom I really love, don't have this sort of joie de vivre. We're sort of fun, in a crazy and slightly menacing sort of way.
I guess what began this reflection was a look over my shoulder at that evening long ago, eating snapper and drinking wine at the partner's home, listening to discussions of which knot worked best on a circle hook if you're bottom fishing for grouper (bimini twist, for those playing at home), and wondering now if here at the end it played out as I'd hoped that night.
Actually, it's better. I didn't have the imagination even to envision what we two have here, every bit as beautiful as the tasteful house I visited that night, with the added breadth of everything from the Perry Elks Lodge on a Friday night to watching the moon rise over the ridge on the Finger Lakes.
I mean, who gets to do all this? To quote the question posed by our late friend John Prine, how lucky can one man get?
How lucky indeed.
Tomorrow I'll mediate a case that doesn't merit the attention it's getting but for the wherewithal of the folks paying for the fight, then back to the plane in Perry to see if the weather allows a nocturnal flight home. Then home to P, or a night eating wings at the Elks Lodge and getting regaled by Dot about what a fine man Roscoe was.
How lucky indeed.
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