The spirits did it all in one night?

Now THIS was another strange day in a really, really strange year.

It started early with a trip to a regional jail. I represent a fellow from Arizona who is charged with a meth conspiracy, interstate transport in aid of racketeering, money laundering, and stuff like that there. There is little that I can tell anyone about what's going on with the case, since at this point, it's headed for trial, and the decisions that he and I have to make are HUGE in terms of risk and effectiveness. One known fact is that $45,000 was seized from him by alert police in Missouri, and the money was (a) well hidden in a car and (b) packaged exactly the way that the alleged kingpin packaged his money. That's going to be rather a challenge to explain - Surely, it didn't come from a paper route. This is one of the cases that is taking over my life. Friend JC from Baltimore went with me to talk to him because (a) she doesn't do criminal work and hasn't been to a jail and (b) to give me a fresh viewpoint. Oh, I gave her a dollar bill to retain her as co-counsel (who cannot appear, since she's not admitted in the district) so that the privilege applied to the discussion with the client - I need a name for him - Hispanic fellow (American citizen, uses better English that I do normally), but tacking some stereotypical Hispanic name is consdescending. OK, Joe, how's that? Very nice fellow, super worried about his family back in AZ, and he's essentially like a "stranger in a strange land." We had an arraignment for a superseding indictment a couple of weeks ago, and on the trip from the jail to the courthouse, Joe saw his first snow. I gather it doesn't snow in southern Arizona. Not sure, never been there myself. So here's a guy who is thousands of miles from family, in a strange place, in a locality where Hispanics are rare and nobody speaks Spanish, and the case is dragging on and on due to the fact that a co-defendant hasn't been arrested yet. How does one wish Joe a Merry Christmas? JC's imput was valuable - she is very much a student of humanity, and didn't come to the table with a criminal practitioner's biases. I'm not proud - I'll take fresh opinions and veiwpoints wherever I can find them. I knew a fellow who kept a tarot deck in his desk, and as he was dealing with a difficult case, he'd do whatever people do with tarot cards and read their "message." He didn't believe that the cards were magic or anything like that, he just thought it was a good exercise to introduce something random and out-of-the-box as he did his decision making. I'm not above borrowing others' ideas, but I'm such a scoffer of occult crap, I'll not do that one. Joe is looking at zero incarceration if he wins; 6 or so years if he pleads guilty; and 25 or so years if he goes trial and loses. If I do anything but let the case consume me, am I doing him a decent job? If I do let it consume me and make choices when I'm not focusing totally, am I doing him a decent job? Sigh- this sort of self-doubt - I don't know how many other lawyers have it. All of them (and me) posture like we're totally in control, totally affable or intense or whatever our persona-of-the-week may be. But "who knows what lurks in the hearts of men"? The drive wasn't comfortable, either - the heater in the Elu-mobile is screwed up, it's stuck on 81 degrees - so it's either roast, freeze or turn on the heater and crack the windows in such a way that the heat is somewhat dissipated at the cost of so much noise that conversation is impossible. If I ever write a book on practicing law, I gotta remember to put in it that folks need comfortable cars, because their rear ends are going to spend a lot of time in them.

After getting back to town, I went with LaElu, son Tim and our mom to my cousin's house, which is something that we have done for the last 50 years, no kidding. It's a comfortable house in a nice residential area, and my cousin and her husband are the friendliest people imaginable. My aunt was there, and she and my mom talked a lot. They both miss their husbands, my Dad who died in 99 and Uncle Junior who died 4 years ago yesterday. Perhaps I'm in a position to better understand (just a little bit?) the love of family this year. There was a modest gift exchange, stuff like sweaters, etc., things that are comfortable. Whenever someone needed a knife to open a package, each of the men in the room immediately produced one. Is that a local thing? Do people across America routinely carry knives?

Son Tim is working at his rescue company from late evening to morning tonight. He's a young, unmarried guy, no children, so he's inevitably going to work a lot over Christmas. I warned him when he left tonight to be especially careful out there - some times of the year, Christmas included, bring out unusually strange behavior in people - the anger is more angry, the anguish is more anguished. His station got slammed today, and I hope that they have a quiet night. Generally (at least here), the call volume is down a little on Christmas, but most of the calls are fairly serious. And yes, I do sorely miss doing that even after all these years, but the fact is I'm too old and not physically qualified to do that job any more. I got to tell myself, "I did that already."

Also, this evening included another paragraph in my strange transformational journey of 2007. "Our church" had a Christmas Eve service. Now, the phrase "our church" is a very weird concept to me. I'm the independent gadfly, the samurai, the knight-errant, the tomahawk wielding, painted warrior, the ice-in-the-veins guy who has in real life laughed at gruesome crime and autopsy photos when prosecutors have flashed them to shock me, and made jokes in very poor taste at the bench in murder trials. I'm the free-thinker, the unapologetic apostate, the heretic, the drinking buddy of Ol' Thanatos, the boatman on the River Styx. And now it's "our church"? We were doing communion by "intinction" tonight (first time I've ever heard the term) and Parson Jim gave me the bread with the loving intonation, "Roger, the body of Christ," and I couldn't resist leaning over and telling him in a whisper, "Yeah, but this is still pretty weird, Jim." When we left after the service, he hugged me and laughed and assured me that God has a sense of humor. As Dilbert has confirmed, that would explain a lot. LaElu has even signed us up for some sort of Bible study at the University next semester. And I went along with it. And my pastoral brother got me a theological kind of book (a very elementary one, mind you) for Christmas that I'm reading and that's actually thought-provoking. And I want to discuss it with him, and with others. I believe in DNA and evolution, fission and fusion, relativity, the inability of matter to move at the speed of light in normal space, the constancy of gravity, random chance, statistical anomalies, that "only the good die young," "live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse," (worked for Belushi), and it's "our church"??? But I also believe in love and peace, in avoiding human idiocy, fundamental goodness, the Scout Oath, and in God. The service tonight lasted an hour and a half, and I was sorry when it was over. "Jesus mugged me, this I know . . ." This is juxtaposed on the stunning family strife going on for the past couple of months, and I'm very disoriented. I have two civil cases going to trial in the next two months, Joe's federal case which will take a couple of weeks, some juveniles who (whom?) I'm really worried about, the ongoing awareness of my own behavioral issues (the presence or absence of which figures prominently in the family strife thing), a transformational diet thing, and I really do fantasize about a cabin at the farm with a chair and a reading lamp and little else. If anyone knows how to put this into a consistent framework, I'd be obliged to hear it.

And I must still say every morning, "All the things of my life are present, and it is a good day to die." That keeps me sane, or at least as sane as I get.

The fourth quarter canon is in process. I'm working on a couple of book reviews for the state bar journal - not cover article material, but I hope decent filler. Oh, I passed the 120 books for the year mark.

I do wish all here a Merry Christmas. I hope that we can all use it as a time to reflect and renew, and that the coming year is better for all of us than the last one.

Mizpah.

R