Goodbye B&R

"[Fezziwig] has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is is impossible to add and count 'em up."

-Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Another slow starter this morning, after twelve hours of travel on Delta and arriving here close to ten last night. These short days, with pitch darkness lasting until well after seven each morning, make it challenging to swing into action.

Yesterday's trip went off without a hitch, a remarkable statement in these days of folks getting stranded in snowy terminals amid cancelled flights and the general chaos wrought by the current administration. The only truly unpleasant moment of the day, setting aside the decision of the Bills to go for two and thereby lose to the Eagles rather than kicking the extra point and taking the game into overtime (what on God's green earth were they thinking?) came as we boarded our final flight from Detroit to KELM. Behind us sat a rather rough grandmother, younger than both of us, with dyed jet black hair and a three-year-old boy sitting next to her watching some sort of video monitor with no earbuds, forcing all of us to share in whatever childhood inanity occupied him at the moment.

Finally P couldn't take it anymore. "Would you mind turning that down?"

Granny protested that the boy would scream the whole flight if he couldn't watch the video. Peg repeated her request that he just turn it down.

The volume of the video dropped. "F*****g b***h", the trailer park matriarch muttered.

She then addressed all of those around us. "If he can't watch his cartoon, he's going to scream all the way home. I guess that's what they want."

That rubbed my fur the wrong way. "Sounds like a parenting problem to me," I offered over my shoulder at Elvira.

"I'm his grandmother!" she replied, as if that fact somehow absolved her of responsibility for rewarding Little Lord Fauntleroy for bad behavior by letting him have his way.

I weep for the future.

At that point the audio from his device went silent, and he didn't utter a peep all the way home. Sometimes kids are as well-behaved as they need to be.

Of course, the entire family (mom was sitting with another little boy across the aisle) gave me the stink-eye all the way down the flybridge as we disembarked. I can take that sort of silent opprobrium. I'm a lawyer, after all.

And this morning I find myself looking back over the years to where all that began, working for Barron & Redding from the Monday after law school graduation until a few weeks after the storm, with a brief sabbatical of sorts in academia after Girls Gone Wild convinced me I'd had enough of the law.

I learned last week that B&R will cease to exist this coming Thursday, swallowed by a huge regional firm as the number of full-time lawyers in the building dwindled to three. When I walked through the door in 1997, I was the thirteenth attorney. They had to convert a staff smoking lounge into my office because they were out of space.

I came to the firm in part because it seemed to offer the best of both worlds--its lawyers were as distinguished as any you'd encounter in a big Atlanta firm, doing sophisticated work, but without the seventy hour a week expectation of a King & Spalding. Some of the best trial lawyers in the state worked under that roof on Massalina Bayou, and soon I found myself second-chairing huge and widely reported trials with bosses who were very much mentors and friends.

And the mentoring went beyond the courtroom. They taught me how to drive a boat in rough seas, to throw a cast net, to tie a circle hook with a bimini twist and sight fish for reds and specked trout, or troll on the open gulf for king mackerel, throwing the flailing, bloody fish into the same cooler where we kept out beer on ice. We went to the woods together, where I learned how to plant winter rye, set up shooting houses, and position feeders for the winter hunting season.

I was and will always be the kid from nowhere, the perpetual sojourner, but they took me to the Econfina Club and the Kiwanis Pig Roast in Marianna, to private fish fries at Boondocks where they'd fry piles of bream one of the old guys (now long deceased) caught up at his place on Howard's Creek. I learned how they lived and talked and viewed the world. It was free to them, and an inestimable gift to me.

And for most of my run there, staff was family. Folks stayed their whole careers at B&R, and when one staffer started doing rotten work because of outside life distractions that never quite resolved, we spent a couple years wrestling with what to do before letting her go. On what's now Administrative Professionals Day, my old boss would pull his Grand Banks up to the dock behind the office, which we'd close at noon so we could take the entire crew out to Shell Island for a catered lunch on the beach, with the attorneys serving the fried fish and hush puppies and cheese grits.

When one of the guys caught too much fish over a weekend, we'd declare a firm fish fry and set up the propane kettle right there on the porch outside the main conference room, the partner who caught the fish donning an apron to cook.

Lots of fish in these stories, as I look back on it. What can I say? It's life on the Gulf.

And our Christmas parties--always a happy, overlubricated debauch that gave us an excuse to bring in our favorite part-time bartender, a guy I recall worked at one of the tackle shops in town. Maybe "debauch" is a little strong; there really wasn't much or any illicit behavior besides way too much alcohol down the hatch before we'd all weave home or, for the younger staffers, to the post-party at what was once the Lynn Haven Yacht Club.

Why does something that good die? Well, for starters I'm a victim of that trick of memory that blots out the pain and the infighting and general nastiness of nearly three decades in the law. More objectively, the firm couldn't change, wouldn't change. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," I heard over and over, as I and others tried to change our compensation structure to incentivize more and better work. We couldn't attract or keep junior attorneys, outbid by downstate firms and uncomfortable with anything that didn't look like hiring out of law school, followed by a five year apprenticeship as an associate, followed by five years of nonequity partnership before a very expensive "buy-in" to become an equity partner.

But maybe trying to perform an autopsy on my old firm misses the obvious--organizations have life cycles. The lucky ones grow from an idea into robust maturity, but decline and senescence and death are all baked into the equation, unless the enterprise makes a butterfly-like transformation into something other than what it was. This stretch of the Rust Belt abounds in those stories--the sad echoes of Eastman-Kodak around Rochester come to mind.

So as we close the year we close the door on a time and a place in my life, wishing those who remained to the end the very best as they step into the lifeboats that carry them to their next adventure.