Between the Big

When a parent dies, it’s not enough to grieve. When you get married, it’s not enough to get married. When you have a baby, it’s not enough to have the baby and go home.

When your mother dies, you need to sort through her stuff, keep what you want, sell or discard the rest.

See if anyone in the family wants it first, though. God forbid Auntie Ray Ray doesn’t get your mother’s rosary beads. She’ll never get off your ass about that.

And then you need to talk to the companies—all the companies: home insurance, life insurance, car insurance, 401k, banks—what the hell does a guy have to do to close out an account? How long must I wait on hold? And then you might need to sort it out with the funeral home, or the crematorium, and, God help you again—hire a lawyer to handle your mother’s probate? (Side-plug: Come see me, we can help you plan for, and get through, all of this.)

Oh and try getting married. Now you need to pick the place, the cake, the food—who not to invite. Then agonize for days about how you are going to tell that semi-close friend why they got the ax and your other semi-close friend did not. Or like me maybe you’ll just not tell the person and await the backlash when they see the wedding photos, because you would rather be your reactionary self than confront something like that head on.

And then how is everyone going to get there, where will they stay? Is that my problem or theirs? Or maybe you elope at the Justice of the Peace court to avoid all this. Well, you still need to change all your documents, don’t you. Work needs to know. Insurers need to know. I’m not even talking about what and when you post on social media. C’mon you idiot, you can’t just get married. You know better.

Or try having a child, and bringing him home, and then getting a bill from your provider that because you didn’t add your baby to your insurance plan in time, you are out of pocket $800. No, you need to remember, as soon as you get home, amidst all the wet diapers and intermittent sleep, to ensure the insurance company knows you had a baby and to add the baby to the plan—and backdate the coverage. Backdate the baby, baby.

But usually doing that on time and right away isn’t enough, because our healthcare system is the equivalent of a dark ocean with no moon overlit, made up of roughly 1 million cargo ships passing each other in the dead of winter and sending out life rafts in the form of snail mail, and one ship might not have made contact with the other ship with the proper whale sound, and so you have to get them both on sonar conference call which can take weeks to “dial it in”.

So what to do? I have no idea. All I know is that it’s a bitch to do anything Big, or have anything Big, or to have anything Big happen to you in this life.

Of course these Big moments can be triumphant and grand. And some can be devastating, immobilize you, and harden your insides. Some can steel your resolve, some can make you vomit, still others can make your life better forever. But make no mistake, these are Big moments, with a capital B, and they require more work.

What to do with that, then? My conclusion: the little things are where it’s at. Not that work is bad—all of life takes work—but it, and its Bigness, comes at a cost, especially if you park your spirit there with it.

The little moments of treasure interspersed among the Big, that’s where I’m trying to stake my claim. The grieving at a funeral with a loved one you haven’t seen in years, crying together; the way your wife looks when you bring her home a shake and fries and you both dip your fries in the same special sauce; and the mundane and silent time in between bouts of sleeplessness when you hold your baby at 2 am. None of that is Big, but it is almost everything.

Not a single one of these moments require documentation, not one of them require a form. None of them require invitations, itineraries, or irrevocable trust formation. They only require you being there, really being there. The little moments are where the magic is, and where most of life happens, anyway. Big comes with a price, with freight that needed moving, yesterday.

Oh you got promoted? Hell yeah, brother. That’s Big news. Good luck with that.

Formerly Male First Lady

Did you know that as a lawyer, during jury selection and before evidence is presented at trial, I can strike (i.e., get rid of) a juror for any reason? These reasons can include simply winking at me (see two blogs ago), or wearing a funny shirt, or saying something that is off-putting. Now there are limits to this, and one of them is that the strike cannot be race-based, and a lawyer cannot use an ugly shirt as a pretext for the racist removal of a juror, which can be a topic for another day.

I only get maybe 10 or so of these “peremptory strikes”, depending on the case, but I’m surprised how many people did not know this is arbitrary striking process exists. I’ve read that there is a trend toward states eliminating peremptory strikes of jurors—strikes for any reason whatsoever—including Arizona wholly banning peremptory strikes.

No group of potential jurors is the same. Which of course is obvious, but it’s important for a lawyer to remind himself of this fact before every new trial. Every trial brings a new panel of people, new personalities, with disparate backgrounds and implicit biases. If you think you do not have biases that you don’t even realize, I suggest “Thinking Fast or Slow” by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman for your reading pleasure.

For a trial this week, I might have it all together. The next week, it may be like walking into a buzzsaw. Next week I might get a panel of jurors so wacked out that I am doing anything I can to “bomb” this jury, which is to say, to get so many of them struck for the most insignificant legal reason I can find such that I can start the jury selection process over again, with an entirely new slate of jurors.

This gets harder, but more useful, the more conspiracy-driven our society becomes. If a juror on my panel believes that Michelle Obama was once a man and she and the former president met in college when she was a man, and that she got a sex change about that time, and then they married, and then she went on to become one of the most influential first ladies in history—what am I supposed to do with that juror?

Or the better way to ask that question is: do I or do I not want that juror sitting in on my case?

If my case involves chaos that needs order, maybe that’s just the right amount of chaos I’m looking for. That juror might manufacture a theory just peculiar enough that the order he creates is the disorder I need to get my client acquitted. If he has his doubts that a strong black woman could marry a slightly built black man and that that black man could go on to become president, then maybe I can get him to doubt all kinds of normal-seeming plotlines.

Or perhaps, on the flipside of this, he’ll take a simple and plain case and distort it so badly that by the time the case is over and the arguments have been made, he has so subverted the jury’s opinion that I don’t know which way it’s going to go. Or maybe he’ll simply hold out on what would otherwise be a fairly straightforward verdict, which can be useful, too.

It’s not so much about how a particular juror will react to this or that case, it’s more precisely helpful to know how that juror’s reaction to this case will affect the outcome of the case.

Which then leads me to a more important point: I really have no idea how that juror who thinks Michelle Obama was once a man will react to a case once everything in my case has been presented to them. I have met some otherwise intelligent people who have been sucked into all forms of conspiracies, but when confronted with straightforward facts, they normally fall in line, and can make the right decision with the facts on hand. They can ignore the conspiracies they’ve heard online, and make a judgment based on the limited information presented to them in the courtroom. The difference, apparently, is what they do at home and online, versus what they do when they are presented something by an actual human, in person.

What’s funny about thinking your great lawyerly skills are working to spot strange jurors, is that almost every time, no matter how weird the juror is, as a collective, the jury will go on to do the right thing. They will see the case for what it is. It is the same thing you see when you remove people from an online forum to an in-person forum. People are more sensical when they see and hear everything in person, in front of them, when the information is not distorted, and is presented, unlike online, in a straightforward matter. (Think: a person whose political ideals you despise, but when you meet them over coffee, you realize you have way more in common with the person than not.)

This isn’t always the case of course—the O.J. Simpson trial being perhaps the most infamous example. But for now, a trial by jury is the best system we have to deliver justice in complex factual scenarios. Believe me, I am all ears on a better system than a trial by jury for judging a person’s actions, I just haven’t heard one yet. My only wish is that trials were a little less cumbersome, which I will write about later.

Crossing Swords

It is not uncommon to be out with women and have one of them ask the other: do you want to go to the bathroom? Or more likely, one will announce that they need to use, or go to, the bathroom, and another will promptly reply: Me too. And off they go, together, like the reply was expected.

I often wonder what they go together for. Is it to talk about cute boys? Side by side in the bathroom stalls asking each other: who will the Cowboys acquire in free agency? (No one.) What about El Nino and exactly how many degrees of this summer’s heat can you attribute to this phenomenon vs. actual consistent global warming in general?

That’s why I was feeling a flood of emotions when my son recently asked me, while we were out at a restaurant, to go to the bathroom with him. Or it more went like this:

Jack: I need to go to the bathroom, daddy. Me: Ok, go for it—it’s toward the back of the restaurant on the left side of the bar. Jack: No, come with me, Daddy. Me: OK, good thinking.

So I motioned for his hand and he put his in mine and off we marched to the bathroom, together, two dudes, doing our thing. All the patrons eying us from their booths, vegetables hanging from their mouths, probably thinking how adorable we look, dad and son, going to the bathroom. And all I can think about is the work ahead.

As we were walking, I was unexplainably anxious about what we would talk about when sitting in stalls next to each other and tooting. Would we talk about pretty women? Moana? Spiderman? How long would we sit and talk? We could sit there until our legs fell asleep, until he fell in his toilet and I had to rescue him, until there was nothing more to discuss.

When we arrived, however, my worry was unfounded. There was no small talk. There wasn’t even any deep talk. It was a single bathroom, for one person, and Jack headed straight to the toilet seat, reached with his bare hand, and pulled the seat up. I would’ve used a piece of toilet paper to do that, but I didn’t get the door closed behind me and locked in time to see it happen. Before I started walking toward the toilet, Jack dropped his pants and underwear straight to the floor, pressed his thighs up against the toilet—you know, the base, the part without the seat that everyone pees on—and he just went. He went for about ten seconds, and then I myself had to go, so I began.

When Jack looked up and saw that I began, he scooted closer, stared up at my stream, and he, spontaneously, started up again. He had to be thinking there is no way my daddy is going to pee in here and I am not going to pee with him at the same time. Jack got to where his legs would touch mine, sliding his thighs along the porcelain, and I thought if my spray turns any less resolute, he might be in the line of fire. As it happened, both comrades avoided friendly fire. Jack finished before I did. He went to flush the toilet, underwear still on the floor, waddling over and waddling back. I was still going, so he went back and flushed again when I finished up.

Once I was done and he was done, we went over to the sink, but of course it’s twice as tall as he is. So I think about who should wash their hands first. If it’s him, I slide my forearms under his armpits, lift him up, and he turns the faucet on. I have to press his belly up against the counter to get him to stay there, hands-free, while I try to grab soap with my arm still under his armpit, and not drop him, and not get any on his clothes. Then we scrub hands together, and rinse, and he’s out of breath as his belly is released from the pressure of the bathroom counter that was holding him up. I set him down, grab some wipes, but he’s already opened the bathroom door with his barehand on the germ-encrusted handle, and that whole hand-washing cirque de soleil act was for not.

We go back to the table, changed men. I watch Jack eat his hamburger with his hands that just touched the doorhandle, and I lament the fact that we didn’t spend a second discussing El Nino, let alone the warm rain outside.