“In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take.”
– Lewis Carroll
Up since 5 a.m., 3.5 miles running through the Cove, reading a couple good essays in the NYT to take my mind off of trial prep, then this view as I walked out the door of the condo to my first conference call at 7:15.
It's not all bad, is it? Maybe I'm in better spirits knowing this trial will be two days concluded by this time next week. Or that P arrives a week from now for nine days of together time, a precious thing these days. Or that I'm giving myself an eighteen hour sanity break by leaving today a little after lunch for Wyldswood, where I'll swear at the two old ganders who'll swear right back, let Miss Helen fix me a drink and Miss Dot join me at table to complain about how much she misses her Roscoe and how tired she is of all these old men trying to take her home from the Elks Lodge. Then tomorrow I'll walk the property with my coffee, hit a few golf balls, and be back in PC at lunchtime to grind out the last trial prep over the remainder of the weekend.
It's a plan to pace myself and get this tired old hide across the finish line of yet another trial, my third in less than a year. The same pace I worked when I was 35. But I'm not 35, and my law partner seemed alarmed when she arrived here yesterday to work together on trial exhibits and witness outlines and all the mundacities that go into trying a good case. "I'm used to seeing bags under your eyes, but today they're worse. You look exhausted. Are you okay?"
Not what one wants to hear a few days before trial and a couple hours before a major hearing that will decide what gets tried on Monday. But I can't hide the fact that I'm worn out.
At least we won the hearing. But there was a moment when I wanted to turn off the camera and just lay my head on the desk for a nap. 150 minutes is too long to be in that fight-or-flight-while-thinking-really-hard mode at this age.
As I was running in the darkness this morning Spotify gave me "Lonely Stranger" from Eric Clapton's Unplugged album, and I was reminded that twenty-eight years ago this week I began orientation at the University of Georgia School of Law, a bare ten days after my final flight in the F-15. That CD was the soundtrack of those days, first in a triplex in Mexico Beach after renters moved into the Lynn Haven house, then to the HoJo in Athens on the Atlanta Highway (yes, the same Atlanta Highway mentioned in the B-52's "Love Shack"), then moving into the little 3/2 rancher in Bogart on a street filled with little kids and surrounded by red clay farms. It all happened really fast, in the space of a couple weeks.
Looking back, that was a bold, hopeful time. I'm not sure I'd have the guts, the "cran" as the French put it, to do something like that again. I was leaving a job that paid pretty well, had great benefits and a modicum of prestige, for an uncertain foray into a profession I knew almost nothing about. And doing it with a twenty-month-old who was the most precious part of my life, a little joint venturer in this undertaking.
And contrary to popular belief, a law degree is not an automatic ticket to prosperity. It's a lot like pilot training, where everyone arrives thinking he'll choose between an F-15 and F-16, only to find out that those are reserved for the top 10% of the class, and the Air Force has a lot of cockpits in big, ungainly aircraft it needs to fill. It seemed back then like most of the folks sitting around me at law school orientation had visions of a corner office as a partner in some lucrative law practice. That certainly happens, but it's more the exception than the rule. The average salary of all the lawyers in America is around $115,000 a year, not chump change but not Warren Buffett money. And if you go with means rather than medians, it's really much lower than that. The starting salary for a prosecutor or a public defender is more like $40,000, and most will never see that national median salary.
So leaving for law school really was a massive risk with a substantial downside. But as Peg and I have discussed more than once over this part of our lives together, we've always found our experiences to have been more the exception than the rule. Looking back, law school was a pretty good bet.
But looking forward, I need to get myself back into work mode so I can afford that treat of heading to the farm later. My clients and their CPA will be here in a little bit to go over witness outlines for next week. I need to at least appear ready.
Comments