Parents sometimes say things like I hope
you follow in my footsteps. Or at least,
my parents did. In my case, the hope was
law school, because my father was a lawyer
most of his life; then in the last twelve
or fifteen, a judge in the local circuit
court. I was in high school when he started,
and had learned to type. He was, however,
no good at it; but didn't think he should
ask any of the law clerks or secretaries
to type up his statements of decision. And so
at the end of the day on Fridays, he'd lug home
one of the office machines, a heavy Remington
Standard with a gunmetal frame and green keys,
and ask for my help. I loved the language of
the law— formal, latinate, nuanced— though I
didn't always understand everything such words
could mean: prima facie, incumbent; appellate,
plea, substantial evidence. We sat at the table
after dinner, my fingers ready to go while he
chewed on the end of a pencil as he reviewed
scribbles on a legal pad. Interviewers often
ask me how it happened that my daughters
became writers too; and how or if I'd pushed
them (that always gives me pause). How much
of our propensities— that bright quickening
to language, those qualities of dark brooding—
are passed down somehow in the blood? How much
is nurtured, willed, imposed; and how much accident,
a hand held out as if to say stop, that's not
what I intended? And it's true, we look to language
to help us regulate, to keep monarchs from corrupting
their powers, to give expression to both the seething
and the profound intimacies in our days. Not yet
a perfect arbitration by any means, but I think
there was a time when we said things like justice
and rights and recourse to the law for remedy or
relief, and it felt like we knew what these meant.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Wonderful! My father was also a lawyer who became a circuit court judge (in Newport News) later in life, but I accepted his (I guess) subliminal invitation to become one, too, and stuck at it for sixteen years. I found wellsprings of a connection with him in the turns of phrase he’d employ in certain limited genres–the occasional legal opinions his job required and (oddly) thank-you notes. I wonder, in retrospect, how much of my love for the rule of law didn’t come, after all, to all of my classmates who put their hands over their hearts with me each morning but from the accident of my upbringing at home.