I no longer practice law and have discovered great joy in retirement. It isn’t that I didn’t like the practice of law; in fact, I enjoyed it a great deal for over 40 years. But law practice comes with a great deal of stress primarily due to externally imposed deadlines which carry significant penalties if missed, and the fact of always dealing with other people’s problems for which the lawyer must assume a great deal of responsibility, both legally and morally. I happily managed the resulting stress when I was in practice since the ability to do so and stay sane is evidence of a significant skill – one which I call walking the high wire – and it yields a peculiar form of satisfaction when you are successful at it, even when, or perhaps especially because, you are perfectly aware that too much stress is bad for your health. But I am now free of those stresses and have found great relief in learning how to manage my life in their absence.
To my surprise, I find there is not very much that I miss from my days at the bar. I maintain my license to practice more out of habit than need, since I refuse to take on legal matters and limit my service to boards dealing with legal affairs – one which governs the local law library and one which raises the necessary funds to provide legal services to the poor. In that way, I keep a hand in and manage to interact with many of the comrades with whom I used to keep daily hours.
But there is one thing I miss a great deal in retirement: my friendships with many clients. I was a fortunate lawyer in the sense that most of my clients either (a) were friends before becoming clients and the friendship survived whatever interaction I had with their legal problems, or (b) were clients first and a subsequent friendship grew out of the mutual activities in which we engaged as a partnership of business man or woman and lawyer. I suspect it helped a great deal that, for the overwhelming majority of my career, I was not a litigator. I was a corporate/transactional lawyer engaged with clients in dealing with the legal aspects of their business needs, a practice which makes a service-oriented lawyer a quasi-partner with the client in the attainment of their business goals. A relationship such as this is a rich feeding ground for the nurturing of friendship; any successful one always requires the mutual granting of trust from one to another.
I think it also helped that I have always been curious and find great delight and fascination in watching and learning about the wide range of human activities that yield profitable livings. Successful businesses range from the mundane to the truly arcane; from those in which the kinds of jobs I had as a teenager or a college student dominate, to the kind of new business idea that seems truly certain to be a success only after someone else first grasps its essence and is able to explain it in plain English to the unwashed rest of us – the kind of idea that makes you slap your forehead and say aloud: “Why didn’t I think of that?” Whenever I was first confronted this last sort of notion, the experience always reminded me of why I was the lawyer and the client was the client: for I was good at process, mechanics, and visualizing and formulating practical legal solutions, while each such client possessed the inherent ability to accept a great deal of risk in combination with an uncanny ability to conjure up previously unknown or untried forms of business. This combination always made for an exciting ride for everyone involved, lawyer and client alike.
It was the result of a client-lawyer partnership that I first met Tracy. Well, perhaps I should say that it was out of a client-lawyer relationship that I first met Roy, because I met Roy first and he subsequently introduced me to Tracy. Roy, who is not the subject of this piece, is, however, important to it. He is a jolly, creative Zimbabwean who has taken to living in various places in the wide world while, I maintain, attempting to return to Zimbabwe the long, hard way – by circling the globe. He has presently gotten as far as Hawaii, and is so delighted with the place that he may well interrupt his globe-trotting journey home and permanently come to rest there.
I first met Roy when he was sent from Canada to become the manager of a major client’s newly acquired business. We quickly became friends despite his initial belief that another lawyer might serve him better with respect to one particular legal aspect. I made certain he never discovered whether or not his belief was true. Tracy worked for Roy as sales manager, having come into their company’s employ after a successful career in a related business in Alaska. Once the acquisition of the business was complete, my relationship with it became that of outside general counsel. In that capacity, I was soon introduced to Tracy, both because of the variety of sales and shipping issues that are common to most similar businesses and which occasionally require legal consultation, and because he also served Roy as a sort of amanuensis and comedic foil. Roy and Tracy were generally inseparable whenever Tracy wasn’t on the road; and they were often on the road together, since a large part of Roy’s responsibility, as the general manager, was the maximization of sales and profits.
It was Roy who provided the seeds of a friendship outside of our work relationship. He had a group of tickets to the Fifth Avenue Theater, a local musical theater occupying a beautifully refurbished former cinema located on, surprisingly, Seattle’s Fifth Avenue in the heart of its downtown. One day, Roy told me that he had two extra tickets for a performance due to someone’s cancellation and asked if I would accept them and join him for dinner. It was a good thing I accepted his offer, because, when Helen and I arrived at the restaurant, I met Tracy for the first time in a social setting and met his wife, Suzy, for the first time ever.
Even before I met Suzy, I’d heard a lot about her from Tracy, for he was engaged in an unabashed, life-long love affair with his own wife. Of the two, she always was, and is, the true charmer. Tracy would be the first to agree with this assertion. He always maintained that he was the luckiest man alive, and he asserted that the proof of that proposition was to be found in the fact that Suzy had married him and stayed with him through thick and thin despite his unspecified shortcomings. Over the years I have found no reason to dispute his argument, for Suzy is certainly beautiful both in aspect and soul. Tracy was a lovely man as well – jolly, funny, ironic, honest and earnest, and an especially dedicated and good father – but hardly Suzy’s equal in the realm of physical beauty. He frequently acknowledged this difference between them with pride and equal portions of unabashed glee and genuine amazement, wondering aloud why it was that someone as glamorous as Suzy had chosen to spend her life with him rather than someone more handsome or wealthy – usually while rubbing his rather bald pate to emphasize his point.
From that first theater evening, our non-working relationship began to blossom. Starting with our mutual love for the American musical, the six of us – Tracy, Suzy, Roy, Jenny, Helen, and me – grew closer together. Musicals and pre-theater dinners grew into shared potluck evenings at each other’s homes. There is something in the sharing and preparation of food that makes for good friendship, so it is lucky that I, who am good only at boiling water and the use of a bread machine, am married to Helen, for she can cook and cook well. Her abilities allowed me to tag along on these evenings with a straight face; she was the key to our admission because of her preparation of whatever contribution to the common dinner table we’d been asked to make.
What I remember best about these evenings is laughter. It was long and loud, and each of us, in our respective turns and within our respective specialties, provided both the lungs to sustain it and the occasional, impromptu source of its ignition. We gelled as a group through humor and a general shared enjoyment of life and its foibles – so much so that our respective children eventually joined the group and became at least acquaintances, if not friends. I remember shared pre-Thanksgiving and pre-Christmas gatherings, shared barbeques and sit down dinners, and great quantities of good food and drink.
When Roy and Jenny eventually moved to Hawaii, the theater group was replenished by the addition of Suzy’s niece and nephew-in-law. Tracy, Suzy, Helen, and I continued our tradition of home-and-home dinners, but the interaction of the entire theater group became limited to the theater itself. And then Tracy, no longer working with Roy and running his own construction business with Suzy’s able assistance, suffered a business reversal as the economy went into a tailspin in the mid-2000s. The reversal was so severe that he and Suzy decamped for Arizona and the theater group finally disbanded. Helen and I kept our tickets for a couple of additional years, but having to make a 60 mile commute to have dinner and go to the theater by ourselves simply wasn’t the same; absent the shared conviviality of our original group, the joys of the experience paled in the face of our commute, and we finally gave up our tickets.
Following the demise of the theater group, we all kept in touch sporadically by phone and email, but long distance relationships are never the same as face-to-face ones. Still, the fellowship of the past kept us going; kept us going, that is, until last week when Tracy succumbed to ill health and passed away. He suffered from Alzheimer’s during his final years and no longer knew Suzy to be his wife. Nonetheless she visited him faithfully every evening on her way home from work at the care facility where he resided, often bringing him a treat and always telling him stories of their life together. On one such visit during Tracy’s last week, he thanked her, with a touch of amazement and wonder in his voice after she’d finished telling him once again about their long life together, for the gift of the beautiful story she’d just finished telling him. In truth, Tracy was still grateful to Suzy for sharing the fullness of a life well lived together, even if he was no longer capable of remembering the basic fact of who she was. Tracy always knew a good deal when he saw it.
With Tracy’s passing, the possibility of a full reunion of our families is no longer possible, but if we do get together I am convinced that Tracy will be with us in spirit – so much so that it would be very close to being as if he were present in person. For Tracy was always the ironical sprite at our get-togethers: the one who usually was first to point out the absurdities present in our combined situations, whether they existed outside of the room or within it; the one who always stood in awe of beauty – not only of Suzy’s external and internal beauty, but of that inherent in life itself. Such a spirit never dies, because it is nurturing and habitually leaves an excess supply of good will behind when it leaves.
I am not certain when we will get together again. Helen and I are unable to attend a celebration of Tracy’s life scheduled for later this month in Scottsdale. But we will be there in spirit, sharing the tales that will be told, and, just possibly, being the source of a few. I am certain that I will be able to hear the laughter from here, at the epicenter of Humptulips County – that place within my memory in which we all have resided since that first night at the Fifth Avenue Theater.
