A Thank You To My Many Friends

Humptulips County has a diverse population, much more so, in fact, than when I first moved back after graduation from law school. Over the years, the area has become increasingly diversified and far more tolerant of that diversity. It is by no means perfect in its tolerance, but the nay-sayers and beetle-browed racists have little voice here.

When I began law school, I shared the general feeling that New York was the aspirational goal. The process of my disenchantment with this notion began at my very first meeting with law school faculty and fellow students – a welcome tea in the Lawyer’s Club before the beginning of classes. When I arrived, the room was already full, and, being a late comer, I joined a group centered around a law professor then unknown to me. He was a short man with graying hair, a rotund appearance, and tiny half-glasses perched dramatically on the end of his nose. The first thing I heard was a question from a fellow-occupant of the hinterlands (in his case, Nebraska): “Professor, I want to go back home to practice with my father for a couple of years and then go on to practice in New York. Would that be possible?” Confronted with what hadn’t seemed a challenge when uttered by the questioner but what had obviously been perceived as one by the recipient, the professor drew himself up to full height and, glaring over the top of the half-glasses, proclaimed: “Young man, it is always possible to go from New York; it is never possible to go to New York.”

My immediate reaction to this haughty statement was to label the professor a pompous ass (a label that easily withstood the test of time), but my strong reaction caused me to begin reassessing the possibility of a New York practice. The professor was from the East, and I began to wonder what I might find in New York, a place I had not yet visited at this moment in my life. In fact, he did me the favor of causing me to consider the East, in general, as a different culture from that I had known growing up in the West, and made me much more aware of the values I had learned in that environment.

Several months later when driving to class from the small town where I had been lucky to find lodging that first year of law school, I found myself faced with a disbelieving wife staring at me from the passenger seat of our car. When I asked what the look was for, she advised me that I had just commented on how lovely the mountains were this morning. Michigan not being noted as a mountainous state, it dawned upon me that I had been looking at a cloud bank on the horizon and thinking of Humptulips County. As I subsequently contemplated the implications of my reaction, I realized I was homesick.

From that moment on it was a foregone conclusion that I would return to Seattle. And so I did. I returned to a Seattle that was a city governed as if it were a large village by a few self-chosen, white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant males, and in doing so I felt as if I had stepped back in time to a quiet place lacking the intellectual and political energy of the University of Michigan campus. Everything seemed smaller, quieter, and starved of intellectual acumen. Cultural issues that were considered pressing in Ann Arbor had not yet even occurred to Seattle residents as matters for consideration. During the initial stages of my re-acclimation to Seattle, I confess that I had some doubts about my choice.

Whatever doubts I had quickly vanished as I immersed myself in practice and the community. Whatever it was I had found upon my return, its presence was fleeting. For I had the good fortune to return to a fledging city ready to flex its muscles in public, and during my 40-plus years of practice I was privileged to have a front row seat to the exhibition and to become a bit player in the show.

Seattle quickly grew from a venue where a white male bus driver could close the door on the foot of an anxious black man hoping to catch a ride before the bus left its stop (I witnessed this first hand and had the pleasure of yelling at the bus driver to stop) only to be subsequently “disciplined” (according to the official response to my subsequent letter of complaint), to a venue in which a significantly diverse population would have quickly labeled the driver’s actions as racism and seen to his summary firing. And lest you believe I think Seattle perfectly free of racial bias, let me quickly disabuse you. It isn’t. But it has become a place where something so overt would be an immense insult to the common weal, and it is actively working on increasing the depth of its compassion for diversity.

From a macro viewpoint, this atmosphere of diversity has been immensely satisfying, especially to anyone of curious disposition. It allowed me to form friendships that would not have been acceptable in the culture of ignorance prevailing in the small town where I was raised, and it provided an ongoing education in human culture and values in the context of a work-a-day world. It taught me to ask questions of others from divergent backgrounds and to appreciate their divergent cultural viewpoints.

So, over these long years spent working in an evolving culture of diversity and economic change, l have learned much: from an African-American friend, the value of discussing societal differences openly in order to arrive at a mutual understanding uncolored by the teachings of a racist past; from a Japanese businessman, the value of taking a long-term view of business relationships and periodically asking for relief from obligations in furtherance of the resulting partnership; from a young Muslim friend, how a religious community can use its beliefs to further, by common action, the interests of its members as they engage in the panoply of life’s endeavors; from a Jewish friend, the value of fighting against all of the guises that racism assumes, the true value of diversity as a goal, and the pure, simple joy that comes from fighting for that which you believe to be right; from my many professional female friends, that the struggle of the male to balance priorities in our culture is nothing when compared to the magnificence of their super-human efforts; from my senior partner and former citizen-soldier, the value of grace and style under pressure, especially when combined with practical advice, in achieving success in the practice of law; from my artist friend and his wife, that the view of life from the right brain, as expressed in the concomitant angles, sentiments and perspectives of a completed work of art, is essential to finding the serenity of mind needed to balance the left-brain, capitalist imperative that rules our days.

There is much more but the list is too long to recount everything I have learned from so many friends and mentors, so perhaps those whom I haven’t listed above will forgive my overlooking their contributions for the sake of the brevity of this piece.

Perhaps, in summary, I can simply report that the one of the true friends I have gained from my days at work in this culture of diversity and change is of Korean heritage; a person who is as American as I, but who appreciates our shared culture from the vantage point of being a young mother who, in turn, is a child of immigrant parents. The bonds we two have forged go far beyond the work place and extend to our respective spouses, families, and acquaintances. Except for purposes of illustration in a piece of this kind, it no longer occurs to me to consider her as of Korean heritage or as a woman, for we are simply friends who believe in one another due to a trust gained by the sharing of lessons learned from our differing stories.

This is as it should be.

And for all of this education and friendship gained from a serendipitous decision to return to Humptulips County at what proved to be a propitious time, I am greatly thankful on this day after Thanksgiving.

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