Multiculturalism, Montreal Style...

Not All Lawyers Are Evil, Just Some...

I can’t remember the name of the gentleman whose personal injury claim was being handled by my colleague DG. “His kids have been apprehended,” he told me. “I’ll refer him to you.”

The client in question lived on a reserve, and had substance abuse problems. The kids weren’t exactly living with him but he needed representation so I got the Legal Aid certificate and opened the file. The initial hearing was scheduled in a makeshift courtroom in a town 300 miles northwest.

No email in those days. I had to use the phone. “I am representing him,” I told the crown attorney handling the file. She agreed to an adjournment for the particulars and the scheduling of a pre-trial meeting. I sent a letter confirming.

This was routine stuff, I’d get details of the case from the crown’s office, I’d meet with the client, and we would work out a strategy, perhaps agree to a temporary order or a permanent order with visiting rights. Or, who knows, we may oppose the application entirely. Much depended on how reasonable opposing counsel was, and on the attitude of the social workers involved.

A day before the scheduled hearing I got a call from a lawyer at the crown’s office, not the one I’d spoken to earlier. “You or your client must appear,” she said, or they would ask for an order in default. “You already agreed,” I said, “to the adjournment, you can’t very well change your mind now. “

“It wasn’t me,” she said, “we do work sharing, and there is no note on the file. Can you get your client to appear?” She must have been joking.

“Um, no. “ I said. “Not an option. And what you are doing, “ I said, “is unprofessional. You’ve already agreed, I don’t care what’s written in your damn file.”

She would not be moved and I was in a bind. What to do. I couldn’t reach the client and anyway he couldn’t be relied on. I couldn’t drop everything and spend a day driving to some town and back for a five minute court appearance. “DG,” I said, “what do I do.” “Call the duty counsel,” he suggested. Hmm.

Good idea. I managed to put the call through, “could you speak to the matter for me?” I asked. He was happy to oblige and the problem was solved. For now...

Well I fired off a letter to the crown that must have burned a hole through the postman’s bag. “Your position,” I wrote in what may have been my greatest moment in the practice of poisonous understatement, “comes perilously close to professional misconduct.” I ranted and I raved about professional honour and prejudice to parties to matters as serious as child apprehension, about lawyers with cavalier attitudes, about allowances for matters held in rural areas. In other words, I didn’t hold back. DG read the letter. “if anything, “ he said, “you’re letting them off too lightly.”

After a few days when the letter hit its target, I got a call from the crown. Before we take this any further, she said, you may want to investigate. I heard that your client died....

DG checked it out and it checked out. Poor guy kicked the bucket. For some reason I lost heart after that, didn’t pursue the bad guys in the crown’s office.

Too bad. They should have been strung up…

Lies My Sister Told Me...

Baby sisters are so wonderful, aren’t they? (Lies I Tell You, Lies)

Never one to accept a challenge, nevertheless I participate in this insanity. Things is, though, that I break the chain, and I am wholly unrepentant.

So, I hereby publish 5 statements, 1 of which is true, 4 of which are out and out lies. Figure out which is which:

1. I have a degree in engineering from the Sorbonne.
2. I have a haddock named Eric
3. I once had a lunch date with Marilyn Monroe
4. All my socks are blue
5. I have never kissed the editor of the Radio Times.

Valentine's Day, And The Story Of A Girl Whose Name Started With K

“It's crazy to me, all these folks wandering around out there in the world, aching for a connection, for some company, and yet pushing it away.” Wise words from my friend, when I told her about being turned down by a woman who’d given me her phone number a few days earlier. Ok, there was an age difference, but I didn’t call her up and ask her to marry me. “She missed the opportunity to have a lovely evening out,” said my friend, and I couldn’t argue. She did, didn’t she, I thought, a concert, classical music, dinner perhaps, some good conversation, nothing more.

At least she was honest with me, an attribute not to be taken for granted.

This is just post-Valentine’s Day reflections. I never understood Valentine’s Day, to be honest. One day of the year dedicated to romance? Shouldn’t committed couples have their own days? I mean, isn’t that what anniversaries are for? And only one day? And do you really want to share your day with everyone else in the world? But this year I actually went to a Valentine’s Day shindig, my excuse being that I am not in a committed relationship. It’s the first time I remember going to such an affair, and I went in disguise, like Cinderella…

As a teenager I wasn’t exactly a ladies man. I wanted so badly to be noticed, but the girls were not interested. I mean I did have some female friends, and they liked me well enough, but I was never convinced that they would have noticed had I been hit by a bus.

Girl 1: “so we haven’t seen that guy in a while.”
Girl 2: “I heard he got hit by a bus.”
Girl 1: “Not cool. So, we getting ice cream?”

But there was this one girl that had a crush on me. Let’s just call her Peggy Sue, after the Buddy Holly song. My best recollection is that I was in grade 11, about 17 then, and she was in grade 9, about 15. She wasn’t the prettiest girl in the room, nor the most shapely, and I wasn’t so interested in Peggy Sue. (cue the quote above). “She likes you,” said my friends, teasing me, when she approached me one evening at a school dance and tried to make casual conversation, which I resisted. “No she doesn’t” I said, “you think every girl who talks to me has a crush on me?” I challenged. My challenge was met with a counter-challenge: “How many girls talk to you exactly?” “Not the point,” I said, at which point the DJ cued Smokin’ In The Boys Room, a song I detested. “I hate this song” I said, just as Peggy Sue asked me if I would dance with her. Sure I said, let’s dance.

She gave up on me after that and when I thought about it years later I felt a bit bad. Maybe I should have given her a chance, got to know her a bit. Who knows? She may not have been as weird as she seemed. But I didn’t give myself the chance to find out. And anyway, maybe weird was okay…

I paid for it though. There was Marla, who dropped me like a hot potato when an old flame showed up, Anna, who asked me to take her home in the middle of our first (and only, obviously) date, Sherry, who got plenty comfortable with me in the back seat of the car that was driving us home from a retreat in the twin cities, then dropped out of sight once we got back to the city, Nora, whom I met in a foreign country, with whom I had 3 days to spend, and who, shall we say, drove me a bit crazy, all this before I was married, and I won’t go on more than that.

Yeah, so I guess it was Valentine’s Day got me thinking about all that, being at an organized event where people are supposed to meet people, all in pursuit of romance and connection. And with the music playing and some people dancing and some people sitting alone and wishing they were dancing, and some who were the life of the party and some who were wallflowers, it sure looked a lot like high school. I wasn’t fooled though. Wearing my disguise, and having learned the rules (one of which is that there are no rules), I made up my mind to have fun. And I think I succeeded. And that’s what it’s all about in the end, isn’t it?

---

Oh right, the girl whose name started with K? It was June of 1975, I was 18 and graduating, she was 16, a bit tomboyish, and we were sitting in the front seat of my mother’s 1969 Dodge Dart, and she wasn’t who I wanted to be with right then, but there wasn’t much I could do about it without breaking her heart in half. The car radio was on and this song came on, how ironic I thought, listening to the chorus. I’d never heard it before, but as I learned that evening, there’s a first time for everything…

Still Figuring Things Out

Is it about who you are or is it about who you want to be? There may not be all that much difference. Let me tell you a story:

There is a woman who I see on the bus most mornings. She is very short, just as wide, of indeterminate age, and obviously mentally handicapped. And one morning recently I was waiting for the people in front of me to leave the bus by the back exit, but nobody was moving. The woman was standing by the door, unable to move, and people became exasperated. And so they went around to the front door and exited that way. I came up behind the woman, who seemed to be afraid to step down, probably because the driver pulled up a bit farther from the curb than what she was used to, and I took her arm. She would not be moved. I slid past her, got off the bus, gave her my hand, and she took my hand, and I helped her down, and away she went without looking back.

And I wondered about all those people that went by her, and I guess most people don’t know what to do or how to help, or they don’t want to get involved or they don’t have time, and I admit that I felt good for helping her, and I wondered about that, maybe there’s something wrong with that, because my initial thought is that I didn’t do anything that anyone else wouldn’t do, but that so obviously was not the case. But then maybe I just want to be a hero.

And so I walked away from there feeling the hero, and that made me stop and ask myself what my motives really are. Do I help people because I’m that type of person, or do I help people because I want to be that type of person, or because I want to think of myself that way, or even because I want others to think of me that way?

Along comes Russ Harris to the rescue. Harris’ book is called The Happiness Trap, How to Stop Struggling And Start Living, and it’s a self-help book of a type I don’t usually read, but it was recommended to me by someone I was seeing professionally, someone who had some familiarity with my personal brand of mid-life crisis, and so I read it. And what it says is this: figure out what your values are. Write them down he says (I didn’t). Values, in this case, can be anything that serve as motivating factors – physical health, financial security, being emotionally connected to people around you – all examples of values in this scheme. So figure out what they are, he says, then take action in your life consistent with those values.

And so if “helping people when the opportunity arises” is a value, and I help the woman off the bus, then hey – mission accomplished. I’m hereby absolved of bad motives. I am working towards being the person I want to be, or to continue to be, and so what if I want everyone in the world to know what a hero I am. At least I’m happy.

And the woman got off the bus…

Vindicated

The meeting Wednesday night of the Writers Support Group started with the organizer, who is an editor / publisher when he’s not leading groups, reading a manuscript that he received two years ago from a hopeful fiction writer with impressive credentials. It was an example, he said, of work in the raw, unedited, unpublishable. Why, people wanted to know, after he’d read a few pages of turgid, clichéd, juvenile, downright embarrassing prose, did you bother with it.

We saw the story in it, he said. And so he and his partner worked with the author to fix up (“rewrite” I said, and he didn’t disagree) the work until it was something worth publishing.

I confess, I would have sent the author packing. I’d not make a successful publisher. I don’t care how good the story is. I’d have sent J. K. Rowling packing, and I’d have missed the book publishing deal of the decade. To me, for what it’s worth, it’s not about the story; it’s never about the story. To me, it’s about the telling. I don’t care if you give away the ending; it’s the journey I’m interested it, not the destination.

The story? Tell that to Hemingway.

“What’s your book about Mr. Hemingway?”
“A man goes fishing.”
“Well, thank you. Don’t call us etc.”

Think of Henry Miller, James Joyce. Does Tropic Of Cancer have a storyline? What about James Kelman? Sure, things happen, but it’s not much of a story, is it. But it’s still fascinating prose. And I happen to be reading, at this very moment, two novels. One is the aforesaid Rowling – yes I’ve finally taken it upon myself to read Harry Potter. At the same time I’m reading Normal Girl, Molly Jong-Fast’s first (and so far only) novel. Rowling has a story to tell, but I find myself caring less and less with each page I turn. Jong-Fast, though, doesn’t really have a storyline at all. She follows a few days in the life of a 19 year old female, spoiled, rich, Jewish, semi-celebrity coke addict, and she does it with such incredible power that I wish the book were longer that its 122 pages.

I have no quarrel, though, with anyone. I realize that literature and writing are very personal, and what’s country for one is jazz for another. The group is more story-oriented and that’s fine. But it made me a bit nervous to read my stuff, because there isn’t much story in my stuff. What I brought with me, it’s all about feeling, personality, the subtle tension that exists between two co-workers who are not exactly flirting and not exactly not flirting.

And so I took a deep breath, read the thing, and waited for the bombs to fall. But I already saw people smiling, laughing a bit even (at the funny parts, not at the piece itself) and when I was done what I got was compliments. And sure, one person mentioned the fact that the story didn’t “go anywhere” (fair enough, it didn’t). And someone took issue with my “he said she said” style, and I expected that, but even he was countered by someone who said that it worked in the context.

And I took another breath, and I was done. It was someone else’s turn. And I thought of the fiasco at the other group, trying to read to people who could not care less.

I just needed to find the right group.

See? It’s not about the story, it’s the telling…

December 24, 2010

Leaving home, 6:45 AM...

Getting to work, 7:30 AM...