Strange Fruits of a Fickle Autumn

Posted on November 23, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Contrary to the expectations generated by the manner of its commencement, Humptulips County has experienced a fickle autumn.  We enjoyed an Indian Summer until the day everything turned on a dime and winter abruptly appeared well ahead of schedule.  This seasonal turnabout left us with many trees with plenty of leaves still attached – strange fruits frozen in place and unable to fall.  And when the leaves froze in place, their coloring, whatever it may have been at the moment of seasonal transition, remained frozen as well.

We are left with an autumnal anomaly: many trees full of green and brown leaves, all of which are dead but  apparently glued in place and seemingly coated with some sort of maritime preservative paint.  As this autumn never hit its full stride because the weather was so warm for so long and the cold days and colder nights were not allowed to creep in with the stealth they usually employ, many leaves never turned color at all and those that did achieved only anemic hues.  Nature’s palette this year proved muted and mellow, as if to remind us by means of vibrancy’s absence to stay cool in the face of adversity.

By contrast, there are an equal number of trees which have shed all of their leaves and are now standing tall and bare in hopeful expectation of a blanketing of snow.  These trees appear to be the conservative traditionalists, undertaking the usual path which trees take in November in hope that the weather will hold true to form and they will be called upon to add their usual grace notes of skeletal abstraction to a wintry world.

However, those still festooned with leaves (albeit dead ones with no sense of self) seem to prefer the road the poet did take – the one less traveled by.  What might be down that road remains to be seen, but only if those rains left to this well-advanced November lack sufficient force to finally strip these radicals bare and force them into traditionalism.  But if their struggle to maintain their radical ways proves successful, perhaps they, too, will produce something as substantial as the poet did when he first undertook that same turning.

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Black Holes and Empty Nests

Posted on November 15, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Life is full of surprises, some of them pleasant.  Even while you are engaged in routine business, the past can reach out and tap you on the shoulder to remind you of something pleasant among the shards of discarded memories.

This week’s pleasant surprise began over a decade ago.  I have been working at raising funds to provide free legal services for those that cannot afford them for at least that long.  But I suppose it really began this past October 1 when this year’s Campaign for Equal Justice was begun and I was assigned the task of soliciting the law firm where I began my career – the law firm I have previously described as dysfunctional at the time of my departure.  Based upon this week’s events, it is apparent that such a condition no longer exists there.

I reached out to the firm’s current managing partner at the start of the Campaign, and we began a long series of email exchanges and had one long telephone call that broke the ice formed from years of no communication.  He easily understood the societal need for which I was seeking funds, but wasn’t certain there was anything in their budget this year for such a thing.  But he didn’t say yes or no to me, and I am nothing if not a persistent cuss, so we kept up the conversation despite his obvious hesitancy.  Emboldened by his unwillingness to say no and end the discussion, I began to worry the matter in the way that a puppy worries a once-favorite old shoe discovered in the back of his owner’s closet.

We scheduled lunch for last Tuesday to catch up and to settle up.  After all, I had been managing partner of the same firm 30 years ago and had been the person to extend an offer of employment to him.  His undergraduate grades had been – to say the least – unfortunate, yet he was second in his University of Washington Law School graduating class.  When I asked him what had happened during his undergraduate years in the initial hiring interview, he gave me the best response ever given to me by a candidate because of its inherent candor: “Wine, women and song not necessarily in that order, and far too much of them.”  After undergraduate graduation he had joined the Navy and seen some of the world, and while sailing had acquired the maturity that powered him through law school.

The main reason for our lunch was to catch up, but I inquired early about my request for a donation since I didn’t want the possibility of a charitable gift to become the elephant in the restaurant.  He said yes they would contribute, and the conversation, following my thanks, immediately turned to the past.  I haven’t spent much time of late thinking about the first 16 years of my legal career, all of which were spent with his firm.  For one thing, the period was formative and my leaving did not sit well with many of the partners at the time, and, for another, I don’t typically spend much time thinking about the past – even if it has been much on my mind for the last couple of years while I’ve been writing a book based upon events which happened to me while growing up and going to law school.

Finding good things to discuss with a former colleague is difficult when the totality of your own portion of the mutual experience was negative.  But this is where a sense of humor comes in handy, because there are always memories to laugh about even when they are founded in events which were the subject of personal unhappiness or despair.  We found those common blessings of mirth, and began sharing the good memories and laughing aloud.  The other patrons in the restaurant looked our way once or twice as we gave way to the occasional belly laugh.

Perhaps the richest mine of humor was one of the two named partners of his firm.  That partner was a contrarian by nature of the sort that leaves his mark not only on a firm but upon all of the local members of a profession.  When his name comes up with Seattle trial  lawyers of a certain age – especially with those who never worked in the same firm – they remember him vividly and have their own stories to share of working on the opposite of a case with him.  He was known as a great trial lawyer, but was difficult to work with because he was focused only on winning and would do whatever it took to prevail.  This should not imply that he was unethical or shady.  He was never either of those things, but he was always the stalking prizefighter searching for a knockout punch in the early rounds.

He was also the person who was managing the firm at the time I joined.  Notice that I didn’t call him the managing partner.  There was no such concept in 1970 in Seattle.  Law firms were collections of individuals who shared office space and little else; the concept of collective work sharing was still in the future.  One of our senior partners became chair of the ABA’s Law Office Management Committee – the name of the Committee said it all: how do you manage the shared environment so that the lawyers can work their individual practices in order for the firm to turn a profit?  The senior partner in question knew nothing of firm management, or, for that matter, of the management of the collective interests of those engaged in individual practices while sharing the same office space.

Hugh, the senior partner whose stories we shared at lunch, had tried, in his tenure managing the firm, to get the other partners to understand the value of a collective practice.  Without any training in the subject but with a good deal of common sense, he took the first grudging steps toward a shared practice with the other partners straining hard against his pull at each step of the way.  He did his best to look out for others – especially us young lawyers – and in the process left a lot of what should have come to him on the table.  The other partners were all too willing to let him do so.  And, naturally, he became discouraged and more than a bit resentful, and eventually left management to others.

When I became managing partner, I viewed him in a different light than the other partners did.  We always had fun together, even while I hated trial work and he gloried in it.  He had been the person who said yes when I waltzed in one day right after being made partner in my fourth year of practice and announced I would no longer try cases but would gather up everyone’s business clients and make a meal of them on the firm’s behalf.  In retrospect, the audacity of my announcement is stunning, and his ready acceptance of it equally so.  He saw the same need I did, and could see past my apparent selfishness to the firm’s need to come together.

Bringing a bunch of sole practitioners together was not an easy chore, and it wore me out as managing partner in the end.  During my tenure, Hugh was both my biggest supporter and my nemesis.  He was bitter over his treatment by the time I assumed the reins, and one of my main jobs was to keep him happy as he was the biggest single producer in the firm.  Suffering the aftereffects of some long forgotten administrative snafu caused by Hugh, I once stormed into his office, slammed the door, stood at the front of his desk with my hands on its surface, and announced: “Hugh, I swear to God that you have taken Sherman’s march to the sea as your strategy for survival.”  He merely smiled in response and quietly replied:  “What took you so long to figure that out?”  He completely disarmed me and made me laugh as he always did when I was in a state of high dudgeon, and through my tears of mirth I told him to cut it out as I was trying to be angry.

So, at lunch my former colleague and I told stories about Hugh.  And near the end, I asked my luncheon partner if he knew where Hugh presently was.  The answer, to my surprise, was Hawaii.  Hugh and Sharon, his wife, had left Hawaii 25 years earlier to live near Sun Valley, but they had recently returned.  Hugh, now 88, had returned to the warmth since he no longer skied, hiked Bald Mountain, or fished its rivers.

Following the lunch, I emailed my thanks to my former colleague for his firm’s contribution and finally remembered to ask for Hugh’s contact information.  Yesterday, he followed up with the contact information, including an email address, telephone number, and mailing address.  He warned me that Jan – Hugh’s former secretary who remains with the firm after 51 years (longer than either Hugh or I were there) – said that I should use snail mail since neither Sharon nor Hugh used email very much.  I promptly ignored Jan’s warning as I am wont to do when such things are said to me, and sent an email into the ether.

Three hours later, following dinner, the phone rang and Helen answered.  When she handed me the phone, she said that she didn’t know who it was as she didn’t recognize the voice and whoever it was hadn’t identified himself.  I said hello hesitantly fearing the usual salesman ignoring the No Call List, and heard an obviously older voice ask “Steve, how the hell are you?”  The timbre wasn’t right, so I didn’t catch on immediately, but when he announced it was Hugh and that Sharon had just handed him a printed copy of my email I began to hear his real voice through the strain of the years.  We talked for several minutes, and at the call’s conclusion he urged me to come to Hawaii to visit.  During the call we shared a few of our mutual stories of recollection, and laughed together a good deal.

As remarkable as the lunch and the call were, my real surprise came afterward as I described the content of Hugh’s call to Helen and we began to share our own memories of the firm.  You see, Helen and I first met there.  She was a secretary there on the day I first started work, subsequently left to go elsewhere, and came back to work at the firm again during the period when I was its managing partner.  When she returned, I was recovering from divorce.  Helen and I had long been friends by that time, but only friends.  It took another partner’s wife – Helen’s best friend in life – to let her know that I was unattached and suggest we ought to get together.  In those long gone days, men and women who worked together sometimes did form romantic relationships; Sharon, after all, had once been Hugh’s secretary.  And while Helen was never my secretary during her second turn at the firm (she had been during the first), our mutual banter and joking soon blossomed into dating, then marriage, and then children.  Now, after more than 30 years together, we share the third state of married life – the companionship of the empty nest.

As Helen and I began sharing stories and laughing together, I realized that my memories of my first firm should not all be residents of the black hole to which I have assigned them due to my subsequent attainment of far more interesting and pleasant legal experiences than I ever enjoyed there.  My first surprise of the evening was the realization that a large number of the tall tales that I, in my frequent guise of Garrulous Old Coot, often relate are from that period and that many of them feature Hugh.  My second surprise was the surfacing of my memories of Helen’s and my first fumbling attempts at becoming in love – all of which derive from my last few years with the firm.

Ultimately, Helen opened the door to my departure from the firm.  After we were married and after Peter’s arrival, she said one day in response to my depression over the firm’s dysfunctional state: “Just quit!”  The idea was stunning.  Helen has never lacked courage and is often bold.  When I objected that I didn’t have a job, she told me she wasn’t worried because she knew I would quickly find one if I quit, but that I must quit in order to find other work because I was too loyal to look while employed.  Six months later I finally acknowledged the truth of her words, took them at face value, and abruptly quit.  I had nowhere else to go at the moment of my announcement – nowhere for my career, that is, but up, although I was unaware of that fact at the time.  That same day I made the call that began the rest of my career, and two days later I was an incipient partner in the firm described in my earlier blog piece entitled “Once Upon A Time….”

As Helen and I talked last night, our nest seemed all the warmer and empty only of the chicks which once filled it.  Last evening was proof that their absence has been replaced by the joys of shared memory and the warmth of a life-long love affair.

A lot of joy came this week out of the far off black hole that was the cradle of my birth as a lawyer.  I realized this morning that my experience of it has taught me many things: how to practice, how to manage others, how to laugh in the teeth of adverse conditions, how to be successful at the hard work of marriage.  All of those lessons have stood me well, and now I am able to give thanks.

It seems that the work of asking for charitable donations is not the grim task that so many deem it to be.

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The King Is Dead; Long Live The King!

Posted on November 10, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“But I believe in my mask—The man I made up is me.”

Sam Shepard, The Tooth of Crime

By a freak of chance, I recently reconnected with a fellow high school graduation speaker after years of long silence.  The silence wasn’t due to hostility, just the normal neglect that affects most of us about such things.  In response to my initial outreach, she shared the events of her life after having achieved the necessary escape velocity to steal away from the isolated eastern Washington valley in which we went to high school.  In return, I provided her with the elevator speech version of my life as a transactional/corporate lawyer in Seattle.

Her response was a surprise.  It began: “What an interesting life!”  I haven’t especially thought of my life as interesting.  I have thought of myself as a kid in a candy store – a kid chasing the American Dream courtesy of a solid education provided by the University of Washington and the University of Michigan Law School.  I was lucky, after all.  As a former law partner once told me when I was bemoaning the fact that I never win anything in lotteries or drawings:  “Quit bitching.  You and I won the most important lottery of all: the lottery of life.”

The spirit of the American Dream was preached relentlessly in that isolated valley, and its imagery was powerful enough to send me on my journey to elsewhere.  But it was a myth of the same caliber as that of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or the existence of Sasquatch.  While it proved to be real for me, it was only because I won that lottery of life.  Those who told me of the dream lied to me about its universality by conveniently omitting mention of the fact that entry into the steeplechase was denied to anyone unlucky enough in the genetic lottery not to have been born a male or awarded a white skin, or to have been assigned to some classification the white male majority felt was beneath notice.  Truth be told, the cream of the valley’s society didn’t want me to succeed in the chase either, because I came from a very poor family too recently arrived in the wealthy valley as determined by valley time and should have known better than to demand a place in the starting gates.  But they couldn’t have maintained the myth of the American Dream if I – another white male just like those in authority – was patently excluded based only upon wealth or time in residence in the valley, because to do so would have contradicted the essence of the Dream’s thesis.

On election day this November, I had lunch with one of my mentees – a wonderfully bright and charming young African-American woman whom I was privileged to meet while enjoying the fruits of my success in chasing the American Dream.  Mentoring requires trust, and trust requires candor and honesty; the result is often a close friendship, especially when the so-called mentor realizes that he is learning as much from the relationship as the so-called mentee.  Over the coffee that followed a good lunch, I told her the story of my re-acquaintance with my fellow graduation speaker and shook my head over the vicissitudes of the American Dream.  Deadpan, she stared me in the eye and asked with a challenge in her voice: “What is the American Dream?”  And because of the required candor and honesty, because of my knowledge of her personal history, I had to tell her that my American Dream had once truly existed for some: for those who were white; for those who were male; for those who weren’t a member of some powerless class; for those were focused, stubborn, and not easily deterred; for those who had the necessary intelligence and were eligible and able to acquire the requisite education by hook or by crook; for those in the know.

After the long string of steeplechase contestant qualifications/limitations had been laid out for view on the table between us, I felt obliged to apologize for the reason she had been denied access to the Dream’s starting blocks: the reason that she wears with such pride, grace, and intelligence; the reason that is the source of her singular determination to succeed – a determination identical to the one which motivated my escape from that isolated valley.  The impediments to possible success which I had been dealt had proven temporary and discardable once the valley was in my rear view mirror; hers are permanent, were exploited by society to deny her entry into the starting gates, and are of a wholly different order of magnitude than mine.  She is still busily engaged in teaching me about those differences; I still have much to learn, and her ability to impart so much by uttering so few words is as powerful as her stare.

On my way home afterward, I pondered the meaning of the lies by omission made by my parents’ generation.  Even as I condemned them, I achieved some measure of forgiveness.  The Dream’s myth has always been potent, and within the culture of time and place its power undoubtedly blinded them to something they couldn’t see, something they probably hadn’t the ability to recognize and understand had it been called to their attention.  After all, I reasoned, those were the days before the Great American Dreamer, Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., spoke, did his utmost, and died in order to change the entry qualifications for the steeplechase.

But contemplating the effects and meanings of my parents’ lies made me realize that my own generation must be lying as well and wonder what lies it might be telling – by omission or otherwise.  Every generation lies to the next either deliberately or for no other reason than it knows only what it knows and is incapable of understanding what will be important and necessary in an unknown and unknowable future.  What any generation believes the future will hold for the next is nothing more than an educated guess.

As I pondered this epiphany, I realized that I still believed in my American Dream even if my luncheon partner knew it to be false; I realized I was still teaching skills necessary to be successful in its pursuit, without asking whether the Dream itself was still relevant, still valid, still possible.  And I realized that my generation – a generation whose pride is founded in the generational conflict of the Sixties that arose from our realization we were being lied to about many things by those then in authority – was engaged in its own lie.  As the distance between the haves and the have-nots increases, as the percentage of our population holding 90% of the nation’s wealth continues to shrink, those of my generation continue to profess a belief in our 1950s American Dream despite the disappearance of the culture which spawned it and the lies which made it unattainable for so many because of genetics and the then-existing power structure.

All because it worked then for what is fast becoming a minority still clinging to power; all because we haven’t yet acknowledged that the new wealth-based disablement criteria are simply surrogates for the 1950s criteria society can no longer accept; all because we refuse to acknowledge that a belief in the goodness and job creating ability of those few members of my generation who enjoy the benefits of the concentration of great wealth is nothing more than a lie designed to achieve the same ends as those 1950s criteria were, made on behalf of the same, still-powerful minority who were born then and are now of an age to rule.  People possessing the same genetic qualities as I do.

There is no denying our nation’s need for a unifying American Dream – a new one that takes our revised cultural imperatives and ever-changing technologies into account, one in which all can believe and keep alive through the ministrations of invigorating debate.  The telltale signs of the death of the one I dreamt can be found in ongoing congressional deadlock and the depth of the anger on display in this November’s election.  The path to that revised American Dream must begin with a recognition that we have been lying to ourselves, and an understanding of what those lies have been.

Lying to oneself is the hallmark of despots, fools, and desperate minorities clinging to power by their fingernails.  Only when our society quits lying to itself about what it has become will we be able to dream anew; only when we empower everyone to run the Dream’s steeplechase if they possess the wit and will to do so will the dream become American.

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The First of November Comes A-Calling

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walked the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost, My November Guest

The first of November has come softly to Humptulips County, creeping in on a dense early morning fog that has hidden the pallid results of an as-yet anemic autumn.  There hasn’t been much fall color this year.  The days stayed too warm for too long and, when the season’s tipping point was finally reached, their warmth gave way quickly to sodden gales – gales which did their best to strip the trees bare before they could brighten the heart as they burned.  But this October failed to do a credible job, and there are still trees with green leaves aplenty.  Perhaps bits of brighter color may yet come; my heart awaits, if so.

The fog is an old friend in these parts and its return is always welcome.  Fog is an appropriate calling card for November: it lends an air of gossamer sobriety to the view from my library windows; it reminds me both of pleasant memories and of the possibilities remaining to the future, and invites me to partake plenteously of each.

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Once Upon A Time. . . .

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Once upon a time in Portland, Oregon there was a small law firm located in a refurbished building near the downtown core.  I was first introduced to this firm while a partner in the Seattle firm in which I began my legal career.  The senior partner in my firm and the senior partner in the Portland firm had gone to law school together at the University of Chicago, but otherwise had little in common.  The Portland senior partner was tall, intelligent, charismatic, and a veteran of World War II, while mine was none of those things.

I became friends with many in the Portland firm as we shared referrals across our state boundaries.  Each firm thought of the other as its principal go-to firm in the other’s jurisdiction, even though we had no exclusivity arrangement.  Friendship was the glue that bound us to one another, and the attachment was loose and flexible.  I found myself envying the atmosphere of the Portland firm as it was collegial and warm, while that of my own firm was hostile and competitive.

Why I stayed in my first firm for 16 years is beyond my present day comprehension, but it had something to do with loyalty and with my inner determination to always try to make something better.  I became its managing partner and strenuously worked at making its culture more like that of the Portland firm, but, in the end, I failed since the named partners distrusted and actively disliked one another.  Following a sabbatical after my last term as managing partner, I returned to find that the culture had snapped back to its original form like a rubber band with retained memory – despite the strenuous efforts of myself and others to achieve lasting change.

Within a few months of my return to my first firm, I realized that I was the odd ball and that everyone else liked the drama and angst that ruled the day.  It had taken me 16 years to arrive at this conclusion, which says something both about my determination and my willingness to engage in futility.  With the encouragement of my wife, I decided one day to simply quit.  I hadn’t anywhere else to go.  I had looked around in a desultory manner, but had been unable to put much effort into a search for a new home due to a misplaced sense of loyalty to the firm that had hired me right out of law school.

Once my announcement of departure was made and I had survived the one hour of harangue I had allotted to my then-senior partner about the mistake I was about to make, I found myself ready to look for work.  After all, I wasn’t independently wealthy and without a job I would be up the proverbial creek without you know what.  As I thought about what to do next, it seemed logical to talk to my friends in Portland who had once said to me that they might want a Seattle office.  So I called.

Two days later, another Seattle lawyer and I were in Portland cutting a deal to open a Seattle office for the Portland firm.  It was the only interview I had; the only interview I really wanted.  The deal that we cut for the first year of operation of the new Seattle office was special within the context of the Portland firm’s compensation program, as we decided to share the risk of the new venture for the first year in such a way that if the Seattle office was successful I and my fellow Seattle lawyer would be paid well, but if it wasn’t we might find ourselves back on the street.  But we would be fully supported in our efforts to make a go of it – while we discovered whether or not we had it in us to balance on the high wire and make things happen.  The acceptance of that risk was the final push I needed to become who I am today.

I won’t bother with a description of the various quests upon which we set out as a firm.  Suffice it to say that I was warmly welcomed and that everyone pitched in to make the Seattle office a success.  The Seattle office was profitable that first year and we became a part of the regular compensation system thereafter.  More importantly, I was embraced by the firm’s members even if a few of them thought I might be too much of a cheerleader for my own good – or theirs.  But after the dankness of my first firm, to discover an environment where the usual mode of communication involved respect and laughter rather than gloom and distrust, who could really blame me for my enthusiasm?

Thus began friendships that survive to this day.  They were forged in good cheer and tempered with common sense; they were maintained by an atmosphere of mutual concern and respect and enlarged by out-of-the box thinking that believed that no dream was so huge that it could not be chased.  The fact that we were small in size had no impact upon the size of the quests we undertook, and we were successful in chasing our dreams because we listened to one another, shared our goals, and worked in concert to achieve them.  It was fun; the most fun I’ve ever had – for shared quests after collective dreams are heady stuff, no matter how elusive those dreams may ultimately prove to be.

And the principal reason for all of the fun we shared was that tall, intelligent, charismatic senior partner I had first met so many years before.  He was the kind of leader who came to leadership naturally; the kind who would argue that he hadn’t too much to do with anyone’s else’s success even when he was the principal mentor, motivator, and instigator of so much of it.  He was also something I was not – a veteran of World War II while I was someone who had never served in the military, and a draft dodger in the eyes of some misguided cranks.

Instead of letting this basic difference come between us, we made it into a bond of friendship.  We shared our war stories – his were literal and real and reeked of the front lines of combat, while mine occurred inside a courtroom safe from bullets and gore.  But we found a kinship in our respective passages through fire, and our mutual respect yielded that rarest of things – the holy grail of abiding friendship.

My former partner and constant friend is now in his 90s.  While his footsteps have slowed somewhat, he still, literally and figuratively, takes one step at a time in pursuit of both his daily walk and the new ideas and concepts that he might find lurking along its way.  He is still searching for the Holy Grail and has come as close to finding it as anyone I know.

On Tuesday of this week, he hosted a lunch in Portland for many former members of that long ago law firm.  I wish I had been able to attend, but old age is a tough son-of-a-bitch and demands your full attention.  Given Helen’s medical condition, I was unable to be present.  But a funny thing happened Thursday morning.  My phone rang while I was out to breakfast with one of my own mentees, and when I answered  I found my friend – my life long mentor and former senior partner, Bob Weiss – on the other end wanting to tell me all about Tuesday’s lunch.  I had to put him off for a time since it wouldn’t have been fair to my breakfast companion, a young Chinese friend and lawyer who, when I told him that my own mentor had been on the phone, said that I should pass along his gratitude to Bob for teaching me much of what I was passing along to him.

When I was finally sated by my Oktoberfest breakfast, my mentee was sent out to do battle on his own while I returned home.  As soon as I got home, I called Bob to find out how Tuesday’s lunch had gone.  And as he talked, a curious thing happened.  As I heard about old friends and was reminded of laughter and warmth and mutual respect and easy relationships resulting from the shared battles of life, I was transported through the magic of storytelling to an invisible stool near a luncheon table in a restaurant somewhere in Portland where I sat watching and listening to my long-time friends laugh, joke, imbibe, and bring Camelot to life yet again.

On Tuesday morning, I had thought about the impending luncheon and had wished I could be present; on Thursday morning, I discovered that I had been.

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The Relentless Grip Of An Undead War

Posted on October 18, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

The Vietnam War has been much on my mind of late.  Being of a certain age, it is a continuing subject of interest even if it seems tired and trite to those much younger.  And now I find that I am not alone.

Recently, the Pentagon created a website to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the War.  The service of Vietnam veterans was never properly acknowledged by an American public tired of war and the tissue of lies that sustained it, and there is no doubt that acknowledgment of its veterans is right and proper.  Many gave their time, lives, limbs, and minds for the sake of that War.   But whether the War itself should be celebrated remains a controversy.  It has always interested me that many Americans (veterans and non-veterans alike) are wholly unable to separate the two subjects.

I am not a combat veteran of the War; nor have I ever served in our nation’s military.  Instead, I found myself in a federal courtroom in Detroit in 1968 as one of 6 plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against the Selective Service System regarding our illegal induction orders.  That our induction orders were illegal is a matter of public record – the judge so found and enjoined our draft boards from processing us.

Reaction to our lawsuit was immediate.  Within a matter of months, my candidacy for a position in a Portland, Oregon law firm was stillborn when the interviewer, an older veteran of World War II, walked out of the interview room after I explained my draft situation, including the fact of the lawsuit and the judge’s verdict.  I was dismissed approximately 10 minutes into the interview with the interviewer’s demand to know where the restroom facilities were and by his abrupt departure to find them.  I accepted his actions and didn’t raise a ruckus in response.  After all, I had known there would be consequences to my actions, and could hardly complain when they revealed themselves.  So I merely gathered up the interviewer’s copy of my resume in his absence and left, leaving a note in its place wishing him a good day.

Forty years later, I found myself in Ann Arbor at my 40th law school reunion.  The Vietnam War was a constant subject of discussion given our ages and the fact that the draft had decimated our ranks.  At the initial Friday night cocktail party, a classmate asked me if I remembered the lawsuit “that our fellow classmates brought over the draft.”  When I said yes and reminded him that I was the first named plaintiff courtesy of having had the last name beginning with the lowest letter of the alphabet, he thanked me for keeping him out of the Army.  His statement was astonishing.  I had never understood that anyone else had benefitted from the litigation; I had always believed that I was the sole beneficiary.  My fellow litigants had joined the National Guard by the time the verdict was rendered; I had been too stubborn (and, perhaps, too stupid) to have done so.  I had also forgotten that the litigation had been filed as a class action.

At the beginning of our formal dinner the next evening, I stood to make a few remarks when another speaker noted my presence and reminded the group about the litigation.  The speaker’s intent was to recognize the central role the War had played in our lives.  At the time I began law school in 1967, my mostly male classmates consisted of those who were veterans at the time our classes began, those who would be drafted during law school and who (a) would return to law school and graduate long after the rest of us, or (b) never return due to a lack of continuing interest or death, those the draft did not find before graduation, and me and my 5 fellow plaintiffs.  When I rose to offer my astonishment that the litigation had benefitted someone other than me, the reactions proved intriguing.  The room immediately split into two camps: those in sympathy with my actions, believing the War to have been a mistake and the draft an unholy imposition; and those who rose in defense of military service, believing it to have been of great benefit to them and our country.

In other words, the late Sixties awoke like Smaug in that banquet hall, and all of the old arguments came instantly alive.  But we were too old and too tired to go at the discussion with any real animosity or intensity, even though our emotional camps were staked out before the main course was served.  We soon went back to being classmates, and some of those for whom my remarks had caused a hostile reaction came by after desert – not to apologize, but to let bygones be bygones (which is how all of us of a certain age have kept the peace over the long years).

Younger people often find the subject of the Vietnam War tiresome.  For them, it is yet another Sixties myth that ought to be debunked now that time has passed, passions have cooled, and priorities have altered.  My oldest son once said to me that the Sixties couldn’t have been as dramatic and unusual as those of us who were then college age portray them.  But the fact is that they were.  It is my belief that the Sixties came as close to revolution as the Revolutionary War or the Civil War.  In fact, a cultural revolution did take place, just not one achieved by force of arms.  Reaction to the Vietnam War, the fires (nonviolent and violent alike) of the civil rights movement, and the invention of the birth control pill were its major drivers.  The seeds of our present culture were planted then.

The Pentagon’s celebration of the Vietnam War’s 50th anniversary has once again brought to light the long smoldering disagreements which were never reconciled after the War’s end.  Tom Hayden has been heard from again after a long silence, and the Pentagon has made its usual mistake of glossing over (a kinder phrase than ‘lying about’) the facts of the War.  It refuses to speak of massacres in the context of My Lai, even though an honest inquiry into what happens when young men are given heavy weapons and sent to a foreign land to impose their will in the absence of clearly specified goals might yet save the country from further military misadventure.  I have my own suspicions about why this is so, but will spare them for the sake of sticking to the point of this piece – which is that old arguments about the use of military force never die, even when viewed in the sanctity of the rear view mirror.

My musings about the Sixties pre-date the Pentagon’s latest attempt at whitewash.  In the context of a novel I am writing, I have found a need to introduce the Vietnam War as a character.  It is hard to bring such an undead thing to real honest-to-god life, to bring it back to a fictional Sixties’ dinner table as the unwelcome guest it then was in the homes of so many – an unwelcome guest that refused to leave even after the three smell-free days Benjamin Franklin allowed to visitors and fish; an unwelcome guest that seemed to have finally gone away at last sometime during the mid Seventies.

But now I find that it never left at all, despite appearances to the contrary.  It remains lurking in the deep gloom at the end of a very long dinner table, waiting for me to pass the salt.

 

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Navigating the Sludge of Incompetence

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Warning:  What follows is a bit of a rant.  If you aren’t prepared for a rant yet this morning (or whatever time of day it may be in your part of the world), go have a cup of coffee or other stimulant of choice and then come back and read this.

America takes pride in the qualities of its medical system.  For the life of me, I cannot understand why this is so.  For the truth is that the pride we take in our health care system is completely misplaced; our medical system is, in fact, clunky, awkward, and, often, utterly and spectacularly incompetent.

Take Helen’s case.  Helen is my wife of several decades and she is suffering from a non-life-threatening condition requiring surgery; a not insignificant form of surgery that requires up to a four-day stay in the hospital for recuperation once accomplished, but one that is fairly routine nonetheless.  But before the surgery can take place, she must have four different preliminary tests performed – possibly in the nature of ‘cover your ass’ tests for the benefit of the surgeon involved from what I can tell, but who can tell much of anything in the fog of jargon and half-information our medical system persists in using to ‘inform’ its patients?  Meanwhile she is suffering from significant constant discomfort and occasional real pain.

Helen was informed in mid-July of the necessity for the surgery, and at the same time the surgery was set for October 23.  She was told that she would be contacted within a matter of days by a staffer to schedule the necessary preliminary tests.  She waited a week and heard nothing, so she phoned asking when the tests were to be scheduled.  She got the staffer’s voice mail and left a message.  (Can you see the punch line coming with just this much of a hint?  Of course you can!  Have you ever had something similar happen to you?  If you live in America, of course you have!  Delay is the grand tradition of American doctors, clinics and hospitals, and we, the people, take the delays and missteps for granted because we’re inured to them.)

To shorten a long, involved story, Helen finally managed to make contact with the doctor’s staff yesterday after having made at least four unreturned calls, only to be informed that they would likely have to reschedule her October 23rd surgery date because the tests haven’t yet been scheduled and it was likely that they could not be scheduled and completed in time.  In fact, the threat of rescheduling was the first thing out of the nurse’s mouth.  This fact makes a sort of perverted sense given my experiences with our health care system.  After all, why scramble to fix the results of your organization’s incompetence when you can just make the patient wait a bit longer?  Especially when waiting about while the so-called professionals screw around is the essence and art of becoming an All-American Patient.  (I wonder if they give the equivalent of the Heisman Trophy to whomever among us mugs is the best at it, and, if so, what level of passivity must be achieved to have a fighting (please forgive the oxymoronic adjective) chance for the award?)

When Helen questioned the nurse about what had happened, she was told that the staffer who was supposed to contact her had ‘left the Clinic’s employ’ (I suspect that’s a euphemism for ‘fired’ – perhaps, for incompetence?) and that the Clinic’s IT staff had erased his voice mail messages because he was no longer an employee – apparently without anyone having listened to them first.  This is no doubt an excellent IT practice, but an amazing demonstration of medical incompetence (perhaps even malpractice) when someone’s life (not Helen’s, thank God) might be on the line.

When Helen related this story to me, she indicated that the staff person to whom she spoke yesterday seemed to act as if this screw up was par for the course.  In fact, given the nature of the American health care system, it probably is.  We have striking proof of its general incompetence this morning from Dallas, if the nurses’ union there is to be believed.  An Ebola patient was transported with high drama and visibility by attendants in hazmat suits to a hospital there for care, only to be left unattended in a room full of people for several hours while hospital administrators tried to decide what to do with him.  Meanwhile, nurses in ordinary scrubs were delegated to watch over him.  Now at least two nurses have contracted the Ebola virus as well, with a warning this morning from Dallas officials that more cases are likely on the way.

We are about to witness a demonstration of the only real skill that most hospital administrators possess in abundance – the art and practice of covering your own ass.  Since this is the only entertainment we patients are usually allowed when things like this happen, sit back and enjoy the show – for you can be certain that there will nothing else on offer.

Helen’s situation is not nearly so serious.  But she is in constant discomfort and some pain, and the system seems not to care.  If something like this had happened in my law practice resulting in a problem that could be fixed but only with the expenditure of extraordinary effort, I would have told the offending staffer:  “Fix it, and I mean now.  Don’t even think about taking the easy way out by rescheduling, but do whatever you must do to get it done in time and don’t come back to me with any excuses about why you cannot.  If you do return and tell me it can’t be done, consider your statement as your offer of resignation and I will decide, based upon the facts then known, whether or not to accept it.”

But our health care system doesn’t work this way for it has too long been fouled by the impenetrable sludge of incompetence.  Our medical system badly needs a colonoscopy – well, actually, it badly needs to undergo the preparation for a colonoscopy; you know, the part where…..  But, I digress.

When I first started as a patient with the Clinic involved many years ago, I did so because of my neighbor.  My neighbor was a doctor and, in fact, the doctor who was the chief administrator of the Clinic at the time.  He became my personal doctor even though his time was limited, and when he retired he referred me to my present doctor.  Somewhere between my first visit to the clinic many years ago and today, doctors were pushed out of administration and the professional administrators took over – you know, the guys with the long set of incomprehensible initials after their names standing for degrees neither you nor I have ever heard of.  The professional administrators must be good at something, but whatever it is it isn’t the timely provision of high quality, no-hassle medical services.  I doubt they are the sole cause of our current health care system’s extensive problems, but I suspect they are the principal contributors.  After all, professional bureaucrats the world over are responsible for a lot of misery and anguish – all for the sake of improving the bottom line with the least amount of effort for the purpose of maximizing their own compensation.

But perhaps I am pointing the finger in the wrong direction.  As Franz Kafka once said, “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”   Perhaps the inefficiency of our health care system has a  much longer history than I know.

How’s Helen doing?  Well, she’s still waiting to learn the fate of her October surgery and so am I.   Sometimes I wish I could learn the gentle art of the patience she usually displays, but most of the time I just get mad.  But I’ve found that getting mad is not such a bad thing, especially when you’re forced to navigate very long rivers of turgid sludge.

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The Blessings of an Early October Day

Posted on October 13, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

It is early October in Humptulips County, and the trees have yet to begin turning color in earnest.  Our neighbor’s birch tree is the only tree in the neighborhood to have already undressed for winter.  It was in a hurry, as if a narcissist wishing to snare everyone’s attention by being the first to drop its last remaining feather boa.  By yesterday morning, it had shed most of its golden-yellow leaves except for a scattering in its upper reaches and a few bunches remaining clumped on its lowest limbs.

Elsewhere, the colors are only beginning.  Yet by the end of the month, most trees will either be bare or well on their way to that state.  Early October is often like this.  It plays a waiting game, a sort of autumnal limbo.  Summer is clearly at an end, but autumn has yet to assert its full impressionistic assault upon the senses.  Since everyone knows the general idea of what is yet to come, impatience resides in the specifics.  During the next three weeks stunning performance art will unfold on October’s stage, and every seat in the house has a breathtaking view and is free for the taking if only someone cares to come outside and grab one.

I rather imagine that if someone had been held incommunicado inside a windowless building for several months and then blindfolded and taken outside during the first week of October, he or she would instantly know that it was fall in Humptulips County without having to be given a single verbal clue.  That knowledge would come from the light and from the easy bite of the day – a bite like that given by a Maine Coon cat in affection rather than anger.

It all begins with the light.  Autumn’s light is soft; a delicate watercolor wash applied carefully by a master hand using a brush of the finest bristles.  And because we are at the beginning of the master’s annual work, each daily walk reveals more of his intentions as to the final piece he intends.  Because of its qualities, each early October sunny day reads as well in close up as it does from a distance: nearby objects are solid in form, yet rich in intricate detail; the horizon is reduced to a fine blue haze resembling an abstract painting, but with enough content and shape to be suggestive of deeper meaning.

The bite of such a day is as much a reactive feeling as it is a result of temperature.  It is clearly present, yet difficult to describe if someone desires a scientific explanation for its cause.  The day may be warm, but briskness lurks just underneath its surface and makes itself felt as a tingling of the senses.  “Look around you,” it says “for change is everywhere in the wind, and if you fail to pay attention you will miss something wonderful.”  It is an attention-grabbing poke in the shoulder by an unseen companion on a shared walk; it is the wind’s whispered warning of imminent makeover.

As a whole, each early October day is a separate painting which invites you to contemplate the wonders of life and the intricacies of its meaning.  Each such day is a reminder to be grateful for what you now have and for the time remaining to you.  Even those early October days which are clouded with rain and stirred by wind are only pregnant with impending change.   They are only auguries hinting of November’s winds; not something to shelter from, but to celebrate instead.

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Ruminating on the Virtues of Pure Cussedness

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.  Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.  Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.  Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.  Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.  The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race” 

 Calvin Coolidge

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”

Milton Berle

While at dinner with friends this past week, we began a discussion of what I have variously called “a sense of urgency” or “ownership” among those who toil in service professions – or, indeed, in any other job you care to name.  Both terms are an attempt to capture the sense of responsibility that a few in these professions have that makes them own a client’s problem to the point where they will pursue it to conclusion without having to be prodded either by the client or someone higher in their own food chain.

Perhaps I can best explain the concept by a story my fellow blogger, Eliot Mentor, is fond of telling whenever the subject arises.  Eliot once asked a junior attorney – let’s call him Brad (name changed to protect the guilty) – to contact someone (let’s call him George) about information that was needed for a client’s legal matter.  When Eliot checked a day or so later to see if Brad had spoken to George, Brad responded that he had called and left a voice mail.  Eliot probed further and kept getting the same response, and finally said to Brad: “Then you haven’t yet done what I asked.”  Brad, not understanding that he had been tasked with making the contact and getting the information and not with leaving a message for George  and awaiting a call back at some undetermined date, had to be directed by Eliot to make another phone call rather than continue to wait, probably in vain, for George to return his call.  In Brad’s mind he had done what was asked; in Eliot’s mind, Brad had failed to follow through and seemed insensible to the difference.

Eliot needed the information and didn’t have it; Brad was satisfied by a cosmetically defensible action.  After all, if George wouldn’t return his call, why was he to blame?  Brad had to be reminded that making the call wasn’t the goal and that he had to find another way.

Someone with a sense of ownership and urgency might well have not yet spoken to George either – especially if George didn’t want to be bothered with the matter.  But he or she would have been able to tell Eliot that they had already made a couple of calls and would have been able to relate their plan for follow through in the event  George didn’t return their calls.  In other words, they would have accepted responsibility for getting in touch with George, whether by phone call, email, letter, or a personal visit – whatever it would take to finally get the required information.  They would likely have already spoken to George’s secretary to find out if George was away or to find out what the best time would be to contact him.  In other words, they would have taken the problem to heart, and had a sense of internal urgency about completing their assignment since they would have understood the client’s need for the information and made the client’s need their own.  They would also have a sense of when that information was required and would have built the necessary timing into their action plan.

I suppose many reading this piece would not find Brad’s response to be lacking.  After all, they might reason, he did make a phone call when he was asked and he should not be held responsible for George’s failure to respond.  But that reaction misses the point of Eliot’s poking.  Of course Brad isn’t responsible if George refuses to cooperate, but he cannot know that George is refusing to cooperate on the basis of a single voice mail – especially a voice mail with the likely content of “Hello George, my name is Brad.  Please call me at…..”

The point of this piece isn’t really about the benefits of perseverance.  To me, Eliot, and others like us, the benefits of persistence are obvious and we have no ability to understand those who fail to grasp the concept.  Persistence ought to come naturally – like breathing or thinking or feeding oneself.  It is a necessary survival trait: whatever life throws at us, we must find a way through if we wish to survive, and God knows life will throw plenty our way before our turn at bat is up.  And if whatever it is that was thrown our way was not really our problem in the first instance, it became our problem once we accepted responsibility for it.

So why is Brad the way he is?  Brad is, by the way, reasonably successful at what he does and most likely understands the value of persistence.  He has a fine mind and an ability to solve complicated problems, and taking on and solving complicated problems requires a form of persistence.   But how much more might he become if he possessed a sense of urgency to fuel that persistence?

It is the nature of a service profession to act for others.  A good friend of mine – a named partner in a Vancouver BC law firm – once told me, after becoming in-house counsel for a short time, that the biggest blessing of having done so was no longer having to worry about other peoples’ problems since the problems had suddenly become his own.  But he was still someone’s employee and the problems really weren’t his own – they just seemed like it, because his goals as in-house counsel were wholly congruent with those of his employer. It just seemed easier to him, somehow, when he only had one client to be responsible for.  Needless to say, he possessed the sense of urgency to which I am referring and welcomed what he perceived as a break from carrying the load for others – even while it was no break at all.

So what is the point of this piece?  I keep asking myself the same question as I seek a way to end the rambling.  I suppose the point of the piece is that, for the life of me, I am unable to comprehend why others don’t get it – why they don’t get something that seems to me to be as plain as the nose on my face.  Everyone is in service to someone else.  Even the world’s richest persons have someone or some demon they must placate.  Bill Gates is probably trying to live up to the values that his mother and father taught him as a child – his mother was, and his father is, service minded to the point where others’ needs have always come first.  There is no shame in being in service to others; in fact, there is a great deal of satisfaction when the service is done right.

So why do some give of themselves so grudgingly?  I haven’t a clue – and am proud of my ignorance.  It is one lesson I have no wish to learn.  As my mother taught me, whatever I do, I must do with all of the skill and dedication I can bring to the table.  Thanks, Mom, for a lesson that has served all of your children well in doing whatever we’ve done.

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The Memory of Shadows On The Grass

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Autumn has finally arrived in Humptulips County after several fitful starts.  The rain has settled in for a several day stay, and while the grass is still tan and sere from the summer’s insistent sunlight, it will shortly return to its usual vibrant green if the rains continue their autumnal grip.  Summer’s tattered remains still lurk in the nooks and crannies of our weeks, and will likely reveal themselves on occasion in last-ditch, blustering defiance; hot cloudless days no doubt remain to us, but are now exceptions rather than rule.

It is time for fall. With my usual fickleness, I have grown tired of the summer and its long, hot, silent days. I won’t miss it for now, but I know a longing for it will return as a pristine winter fades into the weary, dirty remains of late February. But now I need fall colors and musty smells and the ferocity of autumnal storms pounding on a tightly sealed roof to sustain me – all of the evidences of the present year’s impending death, and proof of the continued truth of the seasonal cycle despite all of humanity’s attempts at corruption and interference.

However, I will miss the long morning and evening shadows on the grass of our fields.  They are creatures of spring and summer, rarely sighted at other times of year.  A few may remain to us this year, if the summer does claw its way back now and then, and I will revel in them if they do come.  I cannot seem to get enough of them, and I always regret their annual passing.  I don’t fully understand their allure; I only know that they always lull me into contentment and allow my anxieties to rest awhile whenever they appear.

I think lengthy spring and summer shadows must be creatures of the night hiding in plain view in the brightness of day. I believe this because of my patient inspections of evening shadows from our porch – from the time when they first appear, while they grow, spread, and begin to mingle and coalesce, and when they finally knit themselves into the blanket of night using the warp and woof of magic. Those who think that a summer night springs from the heavens are not aficionados of shadow; in spring and summer, the night rises from the earth and seizes the light from the day, devouring it anew each evening as if it were another instance of fresh prey.  You can tell this by the night’s smells – especially in summer; earthy, humid, and vital smells that say nothing of the clean, infinite clarity of the cloudless heavens or the acrid, corditic sharpness that must be the perfume of twinkling stars.

So I will not miss summer for now, even as I will miss the long shadows spread across the grass as they lie in wait.  I may have seen my last for this year two days ago as I walked to our mailbox in the late afternoon.  But, if I have, memory will serve me well until spring comes around again.

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