What to write about today? Maybe yesterday's lesson that nothing good comes from hubris, as I flailed through the Multistate Professional Rules Exam after half-assing my preparation because, hey!, I've been a lawyer for twenty-five years now! I've lived these rules!
Well, not exactly. They asked me about the ethical issues posed by sitting on a not-for-profit board that is considering filing suit against a group of lenders that includes a client. I sort of know what to do with that one, but surely haven't lived it. And these tests are all about giving you two right answers, with one just a little more right than the other. I know how that works. I used to be one of the sadists who wrote bar exam questions.
New York requires a minimum score of 85 to pass. The next sitting for the MPRE is in November. We'll see.
Or perhaps I'll re-live the thirty-second anniversary, this week, of our deployment to Saudi Arabia as the vanguard of Operation Desert Shield.
It took twelve refuelings to fly nonstop from Virginia to the Middle East. Or so I'm told. Because I actually made the trip in the belly of a C-5, watching some female file clerk learn how to field strip an M-16 from a security policeman who shared everyone's sense that we'd all be out there on the perimeter of the base shooting back at Iraqis in T-72s right after we landed. I remember emerging from the rear ramp of the Galaxy into searing heat and the brightest sun I'd ever experienced, changing the filters in my gas mask for the impending chemical attack, and immediately riding out in a white Toyota Corolla to sit alert next to the jets in a command bunker on the far side of the base. Good times.
Or maybe I'll write about the images that popped into my head this morning as XM Radio piped "Philadelphia Freedom" into the MB after I dropped off P at Guthrie. That would've been 1976, the year of the Bicentennial. I was eleven, riding the Orange County Transportation Authority bus from the stop near our house in Orange all the way to Newport Beach, boogie board in my arms and transistor radio scratching out a little Elton John. Mom thought it was good for me to learn some independence, and let me ride alone for the hour or so down to the beach in the June Gloom that blanketed southern California on those early summer mornings.
A song by a gay Brit about the joys of living in a country that left him alone and let him be himself. My how things have changed.
But what really elbowed to the front of my conscience this morning was last night's reprise of the all-too-frequent exchange up here between us and some unrealistic Yankee whose dream is to move to Florida. This time around we were a little in our cups after bumbling into the Corning Country Club bar from the golf course after nine mediocre holes, and therefore perhaps more candid than decorum permits. There at the bar was a scruffy guy who fit the mold of most of the Floridreamers, in his sixties without much education but a business that apparently has put a little jingle in his pocket. His belle was wearing my date's prom dress from 1981 for some reason, although there was enough of her for two high school juniors from that era. Peggy told her she looked beautiful. She smiled and actually was beautiful there for a second.
And they both had a plan. A few more years of shoveling snow, and off to Fort Myers. Or was it Fort Lauderdale?
P and I always glance sideways at each other at that moment, turn back to the lost souls, and make a face. "You wanna do what?"
They all have exactly the same narrative, you see. They've been to Florida, sometimes for up to an entire week, and after staying on a resort property or meeting their cruise ship for a drunken float to the Caribbean, they've convinced themselves that the beach life is for them.
But, we remind them, visiting Florida isn't living there. See those beautiful hills out the window? You won't find anything like that in the Sunshine State. And the traffic? Ye Gods! Ever take your kids trick-or-treating with your shirt stuck to your back, mosquitoes swirling around your noggin, through a neighborhood of ugly, identical stucco houses? Let us tell you how that feels.
They can't hear us, not at all, their heads filled with the sights and sounds of palm trees swaying in the breeze, Jimmy Buffett crooning from loudspeakers on every street corner as the sun sets over the sea. The suspension of the real world that has disappointed them so.
I used to refer to this disorder as "Margaritaville Syndrome". It's made me a lot of money over the years. People move to Florida and think the rules of commerce and human nature somehow don't apply like they did back in Schenectady. They buy businesses without bothering to tackle the due diligence that would've tipped them off that the seller was cooking the books for years. They form partnerships with no written agreement, then try to spend half their workday at the tiki bar when they should've been back in the office where their trusted colleague was merrily embezzling their life savings. They buy a house or a condo sight unseen, and learn later that the contractor never really figured out how to hang synthetic stucco, as tropical storm driven rains seep through their walls.
We in Florida are every bit as corrupt, inept, and lazy as your neighbors up here. We're just more tan.
Maybe I'm too hard on the place that has exerted a gravitational pull on my life for the last three decades. I left to go to law school, then came back. I left to follow my dream of becoming a law professor, then came back. P and I bought a place up here in the prettiest town I've ever called home; I'll be back in Florida on Monday and remain there for most of a month. And I do love waking up at Wyldswood, or taking my coffee on the wraparound patio at 407 and watching storms roll in from the Gulf. It's nice to walk into a courthouse or a restaurant and immediately know someone who's been part of my story since I was a young man, and seems to like me anyway.
So no, Florida's really not so bad.
But you still shouldn't move there. Trust me on this one.
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