"If I can make it there, I'm gonna make it anywhere, It's up to you, New York, New York."
-Fred Ebb, as sung by Frank Sinatra
Still a lot of snow on the ground out there, after cutting our time at the condo in Canandaigua short on Saturday afternoon to race home as the first of seven inches or so began to fall.
Starting the day with a mild case of self-loathing after sitting down to read the paper on my tablet (okay, stretching out to read the paper) after P left for work, and falling back dead asleep for over an hour. Neither P nor I slept more than a couple hours last night, tossing and turning for no particular reason. But she's standing in an operating room right now, while I sit here at my desk gnawing on a piece of cornbread for breakfast and thusfar doing absolutely nothing I can charge someone for.
The coffee's above average this morning, but I find myself pondering whether we really need for me to manage an espresso machine each morning with the complexity of the Mighty Columbia, when a brewed cup of coffee might be just fine, thank you. I know Issac has a good machine he uses when he doesn't fee like playing barista first thing----maybe I ought to check that out.
This morning in my second sleep stupor I dreamt of being flummoxed by some incomprehensively complicated espresso contraption, all chrome and tubes and looking so needlessly complex it might've been designed by Grumman. Like a priest facing the altar in a pre-reformed church, back to the congregation with the Host and the wall in front of me, I could feel the gaze behind me of all the folks who wanted coffee, but I couldn't figure out how even to start. I turned to ask my mom if she'd ever seen such a machine, and how I should handle all these folks clamoring for their Morning Joe, but when I reached to where she should have been in my dream all my hand found was the cold granite face of the columbarium. Yeah, I guess I'm still processing that loss.
Being a lawyer means having more days than most folks draped with dread, and this one falls into that category. In a few hours I'll be driving to Brooklyn for a hearing in a pro bono case I picked up in Florida over two years ago. The poor client's business partner forged his signature on personal guaranties for three business loans, then absconded with the loan proceeds leaving my guy holding the bag. I wrote to all three lenders in response to their default letters to him, explaining the situation and attaching a sheriff's report in which the bad actor basically confessed to the whole scheme. Two dropped collections efforts, but one sued him anyway, in Brooklyn. I wasn't licensed here back then, and told him he needed to file a pro se answer, which he did.
What happened next was simply bizarre. Somehow the lawyer for the predatory lender had the wrong home address for my client, and sent a motion for summary judgment and affidavit of amounts due to the address of the failed business, and not his home. Unsurprisingly, he never saw it, and the lawyer on the other side obtained a final judgment against him for the full amount the lender claimed was owed. The first notice the client had that he was now a judgment debtor arrived when they took their bogus judgment to Florida and garnished his checking account. Recall this guy came to me through the local legal aid organization, because he's retired and has no money except a small pension. Getting cleaned out by loan sharks was a real blow.
I wrote to the lawyer on the other side, and called, never receiving the courtesy of a response. By this time I'd obtained my law license in NY, and could file a motion to set aside the judgment, with a supporting affidavit from the client. A couple weeks later I did just that, and sent it on to the other lawyer--surely he wouldn't want to go to court and argue against a motion that includes letters to him showing the fraud before he filed suit.
Well, I was wrong--he never responded, and we moved on to the incredibly complicated task of setting a motion for hearing in the Empire State.
Florida, like much of the rest of the country, models its rules of civil procedure on the federal rules. You file your motion, the other side has a chance to file their opposition if they so choose. Your assistant calls the judge's assistant to obtain a few alternative hearing dates, the lawyers agree on something based on their calendars, and on the appointed day we arrive in Court, physically or by Zoom, to argue the issue before the judge.
That's not New York. You start by filing your motion, but then you have to file some ridiculous "Notice of Motion" that lets the other side know that this word salad I just placed on the court docket is in fact a motion. Then I have to file an affidavit of the motion, in which I swear it is what it purports to be. This makes me squirm because I don't have any firsthand knowledge of what's in the motion, and yet there I am swearing it's so.
So, sport, now you'd like to set that motion for a hearing? Not so fast. Instead, you file a motion for an order to show cause why the motion shouldn't be granted, and the court supposedly reviews the motion and decides whether that's appropriate. Then after a few weeks a random email pops up on your screen telling you your motion has been accepted by the clerk and placed on the judge's motion docket on some random date you didn't choose. In my case, that would be tomorrow morning in Brooklyn. But all the notice means is that you're on the docket, not that your motion will be heard that morning. The judge hears the first fifty that pop up, and if you are fifty-one or greater you'll just need to come back on the next random date selected by the clerk, unless you file for an adjournment (New York speak for a continuance) to some later docket.
The entire system is, candidly, pretty nuts to someone who's practiced elsewhere. Do they really expect lawyers to come back every two or three weeks and sit in a courtroom in Brooklyn to see if maybe, just maybe, their complicated motion might be heard that day? Yes, apparently so. And because it's a crap shoot what's heard, I'm anticipating the judge will begin the hearing with "who wants to tell me what this is all about?", meaning he hasn't read anything that was filed.
And don't even think the clerk's office or the judicial assistant will help you navigate the folkways of the Kings County Supreme Court. Poor Steph, a daughter of the South raised in Natchez, has notched several phone conversations with court personnel I'm told range from brusque to downright rude. No, no one can tell your lawyer if his motion's being heard that day--he'll just have to come to Brooklyn and find out. No, we can't tell you why your filing bounced the first three times. No, there's no way to call and set a specific time for the motion to be heard. No, Zoom isn't an option.
Where this leaves me is embarking later today on a very expensive and stupid adventure to the Big Apple. After P gets off work we'll pick up the rental I reserved because P's roadster has developed a slow leak in one tire, and likely can't make it out of the garage in any event because it's rear-wheel-drive and there's snow piled at the garage door. Because the drive is gravel, it's damned near impossible to shovel it, so that car may be stuck in there until May. I have a room tonight at the Marriott across the street from the courthouse, so I can walk across, take my lumps, and jump back in the car to snake back up the Hudson Valley in what will likely be a jaunty mix of snow and ice on the trip home. Enroute, I'll need to stop somewhere and pull out my tablet to attend a Zoom hearing in Pensacola on a real motion involving a real paying client who's out $1 million if I lose. My life has become completely absurd.
This whole week is shaping up to stink on ice, literally. The mixed precip will likely be with us all week, complicating both my hope of getting the roadster over to Vestal to replace the front tires and any plans that involve flying an airplane back to Florida on Friday or Saturday. The forecasts lately consistently project icing up to about 15,000 feet anywhere there's a cloud, and we haven't seen the sun here in days. I'm pondering whether to leave the plane here and drive home, but that would goober up a trip we're hoping to make to the condo over Valentine's week to ski a little and enjoy the view in a space that's been torn up in renovations since we first bought it. And it would mean we wouldn't have the plane in Florida, would necessitate reworking the plan for our friend who's driving our car down to Florida, then on to see his parents, then flying back up here on Delta.
Meanwhile my associate quit, so I'm bracing for an increase in my workload by about 40% in just a few days, and continuing for the foreseeable future. I'm too old for sixty hour weeks, and P isn't going to be very happy working three days a week to my six. 2024 is shaping up to be something, all right. No wonder I'm having the dreams I'm having, and can't sleep.
Which leads to the need to make myself presentable and start putting together hearing binders for tomorrow. That's generally paralegal work, but in the absence of a teleporter Steph can't do that for me from PC.
Fantasizing about a simpler life one of these days. I figure at some point a life-changing illness will force that issue; we're in that forest now, being this age. In the meantime, I find myself moving into the next part of the day thinking of Camus' last lines in The Myth of Sisyphus:
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Time to imagine myself happy, and get my ass to work.
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