After writing the previous chapter, "The Law Is a Jealous Mistress", I thought perhaps I might go back to the end of the Introduction, “My Mamma Knew I Would be a Lawyer”, and tell a bit about what happened after my artist wife and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where there was lots of interest in other world phenomenon, in which I was very interested. However, that doesn't seem to be in the cards for this chapter, which kept growing as I kept dreaming about it.
**************************
For about two weeks, I found myself thinking about when I drove my car in the fall of 1987 into the Arkansas River Valley in Colorado, and when Mts. Harvard, Yale and Princeton came into view, I had a vision that I would write a book about practicing law in a new way. I started writing right away, and turned out reams of garbage. Finally, I stopped trying.
Some time passed.
A woman called me from a small town in Maine. She said she had found KILL ALL THE LAYWERS? in her local library, and I was the only lawyer who could help her! I asked how she had found my phone number? She said she had gotten it from the Alabama Bar. I said I didn't practice law that way any more. She said she didn't know what she would do. Perhaps she would see a spiritual adviser. I said I sometimes did spiritual counseling, did she want to try that approach with her legal problem? She said, yes. I asked her to tell me about her legal problem.
It was a scrape with her ex-husband.
As if a light switch was thrown, I suddenly saw her situation differently. I told her that, and asked who her ex reminded her of, and who another person involved reminded her of, and who the judge reminded her of? It was other people very important to her, with whom she had deep unresolved issues. She was blown away. I was blown away. I suggested she get to work in her relationships with the other people and try to cool down about what was going on with her ex.
That was how the writing of the new book began.
More people showed up looking for legal help they did not yet know they were seeking. They became part of the new book.
A fellow at least a generation above me called from the American midwest and said he had read KILL ALL THE LAWYERS?, and I was the only lawyer who could help him. He proceeded to tell a long tale of lawyers and judges not treating him right. I saidI didn't practice law the regular way anymore and now I approached legal problems as spiritual issues. He asked me how old I was and said he was an elder in his church. My age had not been relevant when he told me I was the only lawyer who could help him.
A fellow where I was living had heard about me and called all upset about a defective part in Volkswagen Beetles. I asked if he had a Beatle himself? No, he said. He kept ranting about the defect. He dropped that he was a recovering alcoholic and had been sober many years and went to lots of meetings. I asked him if he'd ever heard of "the rescue syndrome?" He said he had. I suggested he talk with his AA friends about his beef about the defect part in Volkswagen Beetles. He grumbled that he would never have imagined calling a spiritual lawyer, who would talk to him about the rescue syndrome.
For two years, the evolving manuscript and my ego suffered heavy editing by angels and people angels put in my path. I was stood before many mirrors. My perspectives of myself and my ways of thinking and behaving changed dramatically.
I was taken back into some of my own brushes with the law, including getting my senior law partner to sue the 90-year-old woman driving a Volkswagen Beetle in front of which my older daughter darted her bicycle. What was I thinking, suing that elderly woman and causing her even more distress over something she could not have prevented?
Even more troubling, after I started clerking for the federal judge, I spent a lot of time in the downtown YMCA playing 4-wall handball, which I had picked up after moving back to Birmingham from Tuscaloosa. I was spending so much time in the Y playing handball that this happened in my front yard when my older daughter was about 2 years old.
Our next door neighbors asked my daughter what her name was, and she said it and they said that was so good! They asked her what her daddy's name was, and she said, "Daddy named handball." They gave me the look.
The day after my daughter was run over by the Volkswagen, instead of going to the hospital at lunch time to be with her, I went to the Y and got into a 4-man handball game, 2 against 2, which I seldom did. Mostly, I played singles games.
I was playing very well, and when I backed up and set to take a right-handed shot out of the air as the ball came off a side wall (I was ambidextrous in handball), it felt like someone stepped on the back of my right ankle and I went down in horrible pain. I turned around and no one was behind me.
I limped back to my law office and the next morning was in the office of the same orthopedic surgeon who had sewed my daughter's leg back together the day before. He's said I had ruptured my right Achilles tendon and it would have been better for me if it had snapped in two, which he could have sewed back together. He said my daughter would walk before I would. He proved right.
My older daughter had serious difficulties in her teens and twenties, and I felt a great deal of that was rooted in my being off in my own world when he was young. She fought her way through it, but it was not easy and I still feel responsible for most of it.
There was something else in my fathering past.
After several weeks in1988 of going to my son's unmarked grave at the foot of my mothers grave stone and bawling my heart and guts out until I had run out of tears and snot, I had a marker put on his unmarked grave, on which was engraved, "Infant son: He opened our hearts and set us on our journey."
It took me longer to come around to being able to think the terrible argument my 1st wife and I had about her taking our infant son out of town was so traumatic for his soul that he decided to leave. It took me even longer to understand that his death had messed me up so bad that it became impossible for me to fit into my father and his father's plans for me.
Toward the end of writing the book about practicing law in a new way, I was told in my sleep, "This book is your son." There was a sense in the dream that I would not get too attached to how he (the book) did and I would let it find its own way.
THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A New Approach to Legal Problems (1990), was dedicated "To my son, who died for me." I still see the book offered at online book stores.
After the book was published and had gotten some publicity, a woman called me from Southern California. She said she had lived with a man for quite a while and had decided she needed to leave him, but she was afraid he might hurt her if she tried to leave. As we talked further, she said her brother was a local police officer.
The light switch was thrown. I told her this is how she should proceed.
Tell her brother her concern and ask him to have two of his fellow officers come to her home on the day she wants to move and they hang out inside with her while the moving occurs and they escort her to her new home. Her brother should not be there, because he is too close to it.
She seemed hesitant. I said this will really help you, if you do it. She said okay, and thanked me.
She called perhaps three months later and thanked me. It had worked. The boyfriend was upended and docile. The move out to a new apartment was seamless. She was changed. A new person.
Some years later, I came across The Christian Legal Society chapter in Birmingham and attended a workshop they hosted, where I posed the question from the audience: How do Christians square turning the other cheek with plaintiff lawsuits? Thereafter, I had some visits with some of the members, who agreed that was a tough issue, but there had to be some circumstance when Jesus would approve of plaintiff litigation. I suggested they get out their Bibles and read up on Jesus in the Gospels.
Meanwhile, I last was licensed to practice law in Alabama in 2000. Because of recent dreams and waking life signals, I called the Alabama Bar last week and learned all I need to reactivate my law license is update my personal information with the Bar and send the Bar a check for one year’s membership, $325, and catch up the annual dues for the Client Security Fund, which was created in 2012 - $25 per year, $225. The fund protects clients from their lawyer’s stealing their money.
Imagine a lawyer retiring for over twenty years and then being able to pick up where he left off by paying $550. No catching up on Continuing Legal Education. No proof the lawyer remembers anything he used to know about practicing law.
I mailed two checks to the Alabama Bar, to become an active lawyer in Sweet Home Alabama again.
I don’t charge for spiritual counseling, but I might charge for human legal advice, if a client can afford it.
At this stage, I don't know if I will open a law office.
In the computer and internet age, with an iPhone and Apple laptop, I can meet clients face to face remotely. I can work out of my home and car, in coffee shops, libraries, public parks, etc..
I once trained in and did mediation and can do that.
After I stopped practicing law, I sometimes was asked what kind of law I had practiced in Birmingham? I stole a line I had heard somewhere and said, "Threshold law." When asked what that meant?, I said, "Whatever walked over the threshold into my law office."
Although I do not know if I will do litigation, a few years ago I qualified to e-file court pleadings in Alabama and Florida. How that came about doesn't seem on my Mamma and Jealous Mistress agenda today.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment