A Weary Thanksgiving Tuesday

The excesses of our youth, are drafts upon our old age, payable with interest, about thirty years after date. ~C.C. Colton, Lacon: or, Many Things in Few Words; Addressed to Those Who Think, 1820 (no. LXXVI) 

Not much time to write after accepting Peg's invitation to crawl back into bed after she left and sleep for another hour. Now I'm another hour behind in the crush of work coming at me.

Strange dreams last night.

Just before dawn I was sitting in the upper deck of a large stadium at some sort of concert. The crowd packing the seats started stomping in unison with the music. I heard the structure groan a little, begin to shift. The stomping continued. Another groan, and the lip of the upper deck sagged. Finally, with the sound an ocean liner would probably make when it's capsizing, the deck on which I and these other people were sitting slammed to vertical, then plunged into the crowd seated below. I avoided my demise by simply stepping out of the falling structure and onto the ground, like Bugs Bunny avoiding a plane crash.

Those around me weren't so lucky--crushed dead folks everywhere, like some sort of Bosch painting. I walked around in the chaos and screaming, found a bottle of white wine with a screwcap, still cold, but didn't want to drink it straight out of the bottle so I went to the FEMA trailer for a red solo cup. The stern man at the door told me the government had ordered holes drilled in all their solo cups, showed me a stack rendered useless that way, and suggested I was being ridiculous worrying about wine when I had to acknowledge you could already smell the decaying flesh all around. He was called away from his post, and I snuck into the trailer and found hidden in a cabinet the red solo cups that hadn't been drilled. I stole one, found a sharpie to write my name on the side, and strolled around the rubble sipping what turned out to be a so-so, unoaked chardonnay.

An F-15 flew overhead in full afterburner. Then another. I watched them pass, then commented to a dust covered passer-by how much I wished I was still up there.

Then I woke up.

Gray and cool out there this morning, exactly how this time of year should be.

There's a red rolloff trash trailer down there because someone bought the old courthouse, and is converting it into apartments. Life goes on.

I missed a couple days here because I flew to Texas on Friday to go over the standard legal end-of-life package for Dad with Johnnie. Well, I flew to Monroe, Louisiana because I had a magneto fail and was stranded there. I stayed in a very run down Marriott Courtyard, was driven back to the airport by an Uber driver my age who talked the whole ride about his husband (unthinkable in that part of the world not so long ago), then rented a nice Cadillac and drove to Plano, arriving late afternoon. The house had a party atmosphere, and Dad didn't seem any worse than the last time I saw him. We watched football, ate an early Thanksgiving dinner, and I stayed up way too late before getting up at 4:30 to head to Love Field and catch the first of three Delta hops back to Corning.

Yesterday I was required to have completed 80% of my lectures at NYU by 9 a.m. I would have made it comfortably but for the Planes, Trains, and Automobiles experience of the weekend. Even Delta's wifi conspired against me. So I was watching lectures at 6:10 a.m. Monday, and blew past the deadline by 53 minutes even as I had the video playing on my computer while I sat through my annual eye exam down on Market Street. Finals are in two weeks or so, and I haven't even started outlining yet.

Meanwhile, I'm on my last extension for the filing of an appellate brief that is now due on Monday. I've dictated some, but am hopelessly behind on this massive project with Thanksgiving travel on the horizon. Whatever I file isn't going to be a masterwork, but as I get older I've become convinced it doesn't really matter. The judges aren't there to decide who wrote the better brief. It's just a point of pride for me, a sign of a transition in my professional life as I slide inexorably down from the apex of my career to becoming something much less.

It's the natural order of things, I guess. I'm no longer involved in any sort of bar leadership roles--leave those to the folks a couple decades behind me. I get annoyed at deadlines and mandated court appearances, annoyed at lawyers trying to make their mark in a crowded field by showing they are willing to aggressively engage in what the oath of the profession refers to as "zealous advocacy". For some, that just means being an asshole as part of the dance they do for their clients.

I just don't want to fool with that anymore. Not that I ever did. But now I lack the patience for the exercise.

Today is my youngest son's birthday. I doubt we'll talk, but I think of him every day.

Time to flail at getting a little less behind. Mediation starts in an hour.