Second Son

Our second son, Dean, was born on a Saturday in the evening. I was out mowing the lawn earlier that afternoon, about five hours before. I was halfway through when my wife ran out in the front yard, in a bathrobe, informing me her water broke. I couldn’t hear her at first with my headphones in, and I wondered what she had to say was so important that she couldn’t put some clothes on. I took my headphones off and heard the word. Uh oh. Here we go again.

You would think because I’ve been through this before, there would be much less panic in my voice. Like babies and firework shows—you’ve seen one of ‘em, you’ve seen ‘em all.

I swiped the last row of grass in my front yard that I could justify swiping before delaying too long, leaving it behind like a beard half-shaven, and I hurried the lawnmower into the garage. I took the coldest, fastest shower of my life—no time for the water to heat up. (For myself I wanted to note here the universe’s synchronicity that when we returned home from the hospital a couple days later, our water heater crapped out the same day.)

With the lawn half-mowed and myself half-showered, I wake my firstborn up, Jack, who is in the middle of a nap, and put him in the carseat. He stays asleep, thankfully. Brooke and I throw our travel bags in the car. That I had a travel bag packed and ready to go is a credit to Brooke. In it there were at least two changes of clothes, always more underwear and socks than I will use given the fact that I will ride out a pair of underwear for another day if I must. Add some toiletries, a book, and a magazine. (I looked at that magazine and book once, and that was before the baby.)

The time spent at the hospital consisted of waiting on Dean to arrive, watching TV that I can’t hear because the TV speaker on the baby-delivery floor is embedded in the hospital bed (dad discrimination), and walking around the cold hospital, inside and outside, to thaw out. I crossed a major thoroughfare a quarter mile from the hospital just to get some coffee and break free of the cold and closed space.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Though we arrive to the hospital that afternoon, Dean himself doesn’t arrive for another five hours. In the meantime, the nurses, as usual, could not have been more supportive. One in particular, named Kay, who will never read this and whose name has been changed because I cannot remember her real one, was altogether lovely, and supportive, good-humored but serious about her work, methodically getting the various bags and tools and straps and tape ready.

How did they deliver babies before hospitals? Was it a progression or did it go straight from a manger to something akin to an NFL training and equipment room about one hour before kickoff. Nonetheless, I’d rather be full on taped up and rubbed down than the opposite. IVs and cooling gels and painkillers, let’s spread it all out and take what we need.

Brooke was dilated at two centimeters upon arriving at the hospital. What dilated means I have no idea. Does it mean her hoohah is permanently open at two centimeters because the baby’s head is beginning to protrude out? I could Google what such dilation means, but (a) I don’t want to see that, and (b) I use this laptop for work. Let’s just guess that it means certain parts are opening up, making way, widening for what’s about to shoot through. A couple hours later she was dilated to a five. Then an hour after that she was at a ten. Then four pushes (sounds like MMMPPPPHHHHHAUUUGHHUUUHHPH when you’re in there) and baby Dean was here, in our world.

The one thing you find out about a baby when they are born in a hospital and you’re there for it is just how durable a baby actually is. When Dean came out, same as Jack, I didn’t want to hold him, for fear of dropping such a precious artifact. If I do hold him, I want to hold him like he’s Mother Goose’s golden egg, or he’s the Mona Lisa, where any false move might lead to permanent destruction and imprisonment. So it is startling indeed when you first see how a doctor and the nurses handle a newborn human body.

They passed Dean around like bread at a soup kitchen, wiped the gunk off of him like he was a frying pan with a stubborn smear of grease that needed a Brillo pad. They hung him upside down like a monkey in a tree in the case that the doctor, in a position not unlike a catcher or a shortstop, was able to field a “bad hop” out of the utero. There was no bad hop here. Brooke hit a smooth ground ball, as it were, and between all the healthcare professionals, the runner was out at first.

Justice of the War and Peace

A wedding, an eviction, and a $6,000 fight over a security deposit walk into a bar… Wait no they don’t. They walk into a Justice of the Peace Court. Where else can you find a party like that? There is no joke in this scenario, but there is a punchline, and the punchline is the licensed attorney.

JP Court is a party. It’s the Wild West. It’s where ordinary folks go to do their worst. The rules of law don’t apply, just a good sense of right and wrong. Sounds fun, right? Sometimes it is. The ends of justice in JP court say to hell with the means. Feeling litigious today? Go down to a JP Court and fill out their complaint form. What you write doesn’t even have to be coherent. You can ramble on about the woes of society without citing a single law or statute, name the person you hate at the top, and file the complaint right there with the person behind the desk. Sue someone, anyone! Feeling lucky? Sue a few people. So long as you limit yourself to asking for less than $20,000, JP Court will accept your case.

When you get your scheduled trial date and you arrive, usually a coarsely put together family will be there hovering over an 18-year-old niece in a white dress, next to her disheveled fiancé, and the JP Court judge will crack a joke like hey lady are you sure? After this, it’ll be too late. Everyone in the courtroom will chuckle, including the guy in the cheap seats who has no idea that in about thirty minutes he’ll be called up to the same spot as the fiancé, as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by Shady Oaks Apartment Complex to evict his ass and collect $7,000 in back rent. He may laugh at the judge’s quips right now, but he ought to know, he’s about to be punted, and he, in this moment, really has no idea how hard it will be from here on out, forever, for him to find a decent apartment to live in.

The worst and best thing about JP Court is, as I said, that you can sue someone all by yourself. You don’t need a stinking lawyer. You can bring all your evidence, and, time permitting, you can show it all to the judge, if he or she is interested in seeing it. You can meander on about this or that, go off the rails, come back on, and then ask for thousands of dollars. Rules be damned, anything goes.

Why is this bad? Because I’m a lawyer. It’s good for you, the non-lawyer. Or so you think. In reality, if you try to do this yourself—suing someone without the help of a lawyer—and you do go up against a person represented by a lawyer, your chances are not very good. You don’t know this of course, but hell, what do you have to lose, you’re trying this case yourself. You’re not paying an attorney. Maybe you’ve prepared your case while you “work from home”, and this is your “side-hustle.” The person you’re suing is paying attorney’s fees to defend your lawsuit, and, even if you lose your shirt, you can find solace in the fact that you forced the other side to spend thousands of dollars to hire an attorney to be here at trial today.

And to use “trial” here is a generous word. Think Judge Judy. Two people barking back and forth about how the other side did them wrong, while the judge interjects a steady voice of civility so that both sides can go off the rails again and drive the TV ratings up. Judge Judy is in fact set up to emulate a JP Court where both sides are representing themselves, known as “pro se representation.”

I was in JP Court a few months ago representing a client. My client was being sued by a 50-year-old man-child who never takes off his Air Force Veteran ballcap. He was the most prepared plaintiff ever. He was more prepared than most of the lawyers I run into in court. But guess what? He lost. He had a stack of exhibits three inches thick. He recorded my client in a conversation (very shady), and thanks to the fact that the Rules of Evidence don’t apply, he got to play the recording, from his phone.

But he did not get to the point, he didn’t know how to organize his exhibits, he meandered, and he said many things that, while they were important to him, they were in no way relevant to whether or not he had a binding agreement with my client. And this annoyed the judge. Because when the guy finally got to the point, it was readily apparent he did not have a contract with my client. Just like I tried to tell him before the trial. And the judge told him as much, too, once it was all said and done. “Buddy,” the judge started in, “I see how prepared you are, but do you know what a contract is? Do you know what a breach of contract lawsuit entails? You need, among other things, an offer, acceptance, consideration exchanged, performance, and damages. You can’t prove you had any of that.”

So he lost. We won. It is not anything near worth gloating about. To fight this silly lawsuit against a guy who thought he could win a case all on his own without an attorney, my client had to pay me a couple thousand dollars. And I certainly had better things to do than to go up to court to defend this silly lawsuit.

But, despite what you may think, none of this makes me mad. That’s what JP Court is for. It’s to try to do “justice.” Rules of law and evidence, in JP Court anyway, are not as important as doing “justice”, whatever "justice" means that day. I kind of like that idea, and as a life philosophy, I think it’s healthy.

If you lose at JP Court, as the judge will tell you, you can appeal the case to “big boy” or “big girl” court, a/k/a county court, in the big fancy courthouse located in the city that is the county seat.

But just know, in big boy court, the Rules of Evidence apply. And if you want to fight this again, you might want to hire a lawyer. You have 21 days from the date of JP Court judgment to appeal a case.

Do you know what man-child-Air-Force-Veteran-ballcap-guy did on the 20th day? You got it. He appealed. And we went to county court to fight it all over again. And you know what else? He didn’t hire an attorney for county court either. So you won't be surprised to know that when I got to county court and the guy still did not have a lawyer I asked him, “hey, has anything changed? Why are we here in county court? And do you have a lawyer this time?”

“Nothing’s changed,” he replies.

“Then why are we here?” I ask.

“Because I’m right," he says. “Because I’m right,” he says again, his face scrunching up as he looks and points at my client, “and he’s wrong.”

Ah, indeed. If only it were about right and wrong.

Marijuana Bear

I saw a tweet recently that said, ‘They should make a Cocaine Bear prequel called Marijuana Bear where he’s just kind of experimenting and swears he’s not going to try anything harder.’

Funny idea, awful television. What’s to see? Momma bear tumbling around having the time of her life, eating honey by the gallon, letting campers pet her cubs and take her salmon. Where’s the conflict? If Leo’s character in the Revenant ran into Marijuana Bear instead, he would still be without an Oscar.

And so it was that at the Fort Worth Zoo last weekend, it appeared that every last animal had consumed a tray of edibles first thing in the morning. Of course it could’ve also been the heat. And maybe it had to do with the kind of lethargy that only a creature who has realized their entire life might be pacing back and forth between a half-court sized turf/Bermuda lawn enclosed by glass walls can experience, walls that allow for toddlers to pound an incessant ruckus and press their lips to the glass, when all the monkey wants to do is trip off some brownies.

I think I am more of a fan of the circus. At least carnies don’t pretend anymore to be on the side of the animal. And you sure as hell won’t run into as many babystrollers at the circus. The guy in a black tuxedo pokes and prods the animal and probably gives the thing all sorts of drugs so that it can be ready to jump through fire. Kind of like what Elvis’s team had to do to prop him up for his concerts just before his death. The morality of the idea notwithstanding, at least the circus’s entertainment is worth the price. $20 to see a lion jump through some hoops and chase after a guy in a tuxedo with murder on his mind? Ok, I can give you $20 for that.

Do we need the zoo? The specials I watch with Jack that are on Netflix, showing animals in the wild, are a hundred times better than seeing a leopard sunbathing on a plastic rock. At the Fort Worth Zoo right now they are advertising it as a “Predators”-focused period, with a picture of all the cats posed most fearsome—squinty eyes, scowling, teeth bared.

And yet, the lions weren’t even there that day—on a Saturday no less. Are you sure, Fort Worth Zoo, that you couldn’t have taken the lions to Petco on a Tuesday instead of on the weekend? Is the lion on a load-management program?

And the one visible tiger was a teenage tiger, who, like a true teenager, was killing time doing absolutely nothing. He never moved. He staid more still than even the crocodile, and I thought the croc was fake for about 45 seconds, until he finally blinked and we had to go.

I’m thinking zoos should start setting up obstacle courses for the animals. Something to get their juices flowing. This could be not unlike the skills challenge at the NFL Pro Bowl, or during NBA All-Star Weekend. Imagine, an orangutan drills a three-pointer from his perch on his manufactured playground, or bounce-passes a ball through a net ten feet away before climbing on the backboard for a windmill dunk. Show me that and then I will give you $10 for ice cream.

The zoo has a semi-noble end purpose, through albeit questionable means, to allow children to come see wild animals, in person, that they otherwise would never get to see in their lifetime. I think the premise goes something like: seeing the real-deal animal will stoke the child’s curiosity enough that they become grown-ups who appreciate the animal kingdom, and their importance in the great Circle of Life (Mufasa voice). I’m thinking too of this circular arrangement: seeing animals in captivity at a young age will cause those children as adults to speak out against the harms of holding those very animals in captivity. Like a Twitter Park Ranger. See: Sea World.

But I also understand that you cannot discount the sheer happiness of the experience in the mind of a child. You can see it all over their face the moment they walk into the Zoo and see that first animal. That alone might be worth the price of admission. Barely, but OK.

Let’s get back to the experience, however. If you can get through one day at the zoo without ten-point turning your child’s stroller at least seven times, I applaud you. Extra points if you don’t lose the stroller down a steep ramp. Your reward in these situations is fitting just inside a double door, with one of them locked (they’re always locked), not knowing what’s inside, only to bust your wheels through to get a large whiff of penguin shit, and then bask in that aroma for a good 15 minutes while you wait for the strollers to exit in front of you, in single-file formation.

And for God’s sake, spare me the birds. There were no less than 1,000 birds in that zoo. I saw a crow, likely from Lake Worth, eating the parrots’ food. “Oh you’re from West Africa?” asks the crow. “Well, I’m from the hood, sweetie, just up I-35. Let me show you how we do it around here, you redfeather—give me your lunch money.”

Putting birds in a zoo is the biggest space-filler since the Beard episode in Season 2 of Ted Lasso. I don’t care if it’s a blueheaded crane or a redheaded crane. I never, ever, went to the zoo to see a crane.

Oh what a day it was. Did I mention it was hotter than Africa? That was the most realistic part of the whole experience. Pass me that bong, chimp, it’s hot out here. I am trying to get lost in the rich color of a blue macaw.