Good morning:
For somewhere, it is morning. In London, I suppose; six hours ahead of us, where the Olympiads have already trod upon the British soil with their heads thrown back, jubilant eyes shining towards the cheering crowd. As I watched the 530 American athletes, a strange sensation rose within me, starting with a clenching in my stomach. I found myself overwhelmed with something that still haunts me, hours later: an undefined, unsettling emotion that leaves me wakeful and draws me from my pillow to the keyboard of my computer.
I am not sure what it means to be an American anymore. I find myself re-examining long-held notions. I sat over breakfast with a long-time Democrat activist this week, early enough that the hostess had had to unlock the front door to admit me and brought my coffee as her co-workers threw on the lights and drew open the blinds. My breakfast companion was an old acquaintance, one of the brains behind many campaigns on which I worked in my younger years.
We could not restrain ourselves from discussing the election, and I listened to his keen analysis. He acknowledged the same sort of weariness with the whole process that makes me recoil from political activism, decades after I willingly acquired a stinging sunburn working the polls from morning until long after the setting of the blazing sun. Though we agreed that neither of us could ever switch parties, we forlornly conceded the devastation that the stark divide between the two factions has occasioned. Ten years that separate us in age and cast us into different generations, but we both keenly feel the overbearing fatigue that comes from endless enthusiasm too long unrewarded.
But none of that means anything when I see the colors of my country held aloft by strong young arms, when I follow the path cut by the firm steps of American athletes marching on foreign ground, arms entwined, cell phones held aloft to record the entrance of Team USA from the first person. On the other side of the world from these young men and women, I pause in my reading of a dull Italian mystery to watch their entrance, thinking to myself, these are Americans, these are my brothers and sisters.
I remember an evening, long ago, when I stood at the base of a flagpole with my Camp Fire Girls troop. I had drawn flag duty that morning, and the sun would soon set. One of our members lowered the flag. I reached, with my small hands and clumsy fingers, to catch the cloth so that it would not touch the ground. She undid the clasps that held it. We each took two corners, and I walked backwards so that the fabric stretched between us, stumbling only a little. The sounds of Taps drifted from the loud speakers on nearby poles, each mournful note reverberating through the still air. My companion and I folded the flag as we had been taught and tirelessly practiced. My hands trembled; I pursed my lips so tightly that they grew numb.
We met in the middle, and finished the last fold, tucking the edges to form a solid triangle. I tendered the flag to my troop mate. She turned, crisply, and placed it in the waiting hands of the staff member who had come to monitor the process. Our job done, we silently marched across the empty quadrangle and made our way to the bunks which housed us.
As I lay in bed that night, sleepless even as I am this night, I reflected on the ceremony in which I had just participated. I listened to the sounds of my bunk mates settling for the night, staring out the window at the starlit Ozark sky. I had no sense of loyalty to my country at that age. Flashes of understanding only occasionally fired through my otherwise lazy synapses.
I remembered being held over the cheering crowds at a rally for John F. Kennedy, my older sister's strength hoisting me above the clamoring din so that I could slip my tiny hand into the large, warm clasp of the young senator who would soon be crowned and take his place in Camelot. A few years later, after the King had been slain, I chanted anti-Goldwater songs as I skipped rope, to the consternation of my best friend whose parents must have been Republicans. And always, I listened to my father talk of going to War, the war that followed the one that had been intended to put an end to such human folly; but I did not then equate my father's march down the Burma trail with any kind of patriotism. To me, his effort seemed sad and useless, like the work of the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.
Somewhere in time, my vague sense of belonging to a nation took solid form. I fly the Stars and Stripes and have for the 19 years of my occupancy of my present home. I did not form my loyalty while working on any of the many elections in which I stuffed fliers and telephoned to cajole voters into leaving their comfortable recliners to vote. Those efforts benefited candidates, and my enthusiasm stemmed from allegiance to those candidates.
I hear again the haunting sound of Taps, and realize that somehow my national pride is connected with the song's long mournful notes. I close my eyes and try to trace the route from that camper's bunk, from which I listened to the sounds of crickets and the calls of night owls, to the lurching of my stomach as I watched Team USA enter the Olympic stadium. In the forty-five years between those moments, I became an American by choice.
The words of Taps drift through my mind:
Day is done, gone the sun
From the lakes, from the hills, from the sky
All is well, safely rest
God is nigh.
Fading light dims the sight
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright
From afar, drawing near
Falls the night.
Thanks and praise for our days
Neath the sun, neath the stars, neath the sky
As we go, this we know
God is nigh.(1)
Sorrow mingles with awe as a tableau arises unbidden in my memory: From the window of a slowly moving car, I see a row of soldiers lining the road. I slip from the car soon after it stops, and walk over unlevel ground towards a raised white tent. I stand beside my sister as a coffin is carried from the hearse, my infant son clutched against my breast. The bugler plays. Standing on a nearby rise, three riflemen lift their weapons, and discharge their three volleys into the afternoon air. Silent soldiers take the flag from the coffin, fold it as I had folded the Camp's flag so many years before, and, silent still, present it to my nephew Eric, the oldest grandson of a fallen giant.
On many afternoons in my childhood, I stood in my father's workroom and traced the contours of his Muleskinner's stirrups, gingerly touched the ivory brought home from that desolate beautiful country in which he served, and read the faded typing on the pass that he had created for himself. I held in my hands a creased photograph of my father as a young soldier. The intentness of my scrutiny creased my brow as I studied the light in his eyes, first in the picture and then in his aging face. I watched him while he told his stories, wondering if his obsession with war flowed from the terror that he saw, or because in that war, he had a sense of purpose derived from the service that he rendered to his country. I never knew. But when I stand on my porch and watch my flag tossing in the breeze, the eyes of my father come to mind.
I have just a few hours left in which to find some rest. When morning comes, I will drag myself to the office, where I will brew coffee before the other lawyer and our two clients arrive. From the seeds planted in a late-afternoon call at the end of the Friday workday, the terms of a settlement will be painfully negotiated. Signatures will be cast upon the lines at the bottom of the final drafts. Notary seals will be affixed; and hands shaken. When the meeting is done, I will find a coffee shop with a television, and for an hour or so, nothing will matter but the quest of my fellow Americans for gold.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
(1) written by Horace Lorenzo Trim
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Saturday Musings, 21 July 2012
Good morning,
A shrill bird sounds its six-note call high above our home. The impatiens have slightly wilted in their clay pots but have otherwise endured the vicious heat of the last week. I saved several pansies by transferring them from the open deck to the shade of the high-ceilinged porch, but the Gerber daisies droop on their wicker stands. In their lamentable state, they seem to reproach me.
I think about the aging cedar that we removed last year, and gaze over the railing at the holly bush struggling to rise in its place. Though the basement floor drain seems to run significantly better without a steady diet of cedar needles, I still miss the spindly, struggling majesty of the tree. From kindergarten's task of memorizing the Joyce Kilmer poem, to senior year, lying beneath a tree with my religion case, gazing into its boughs and learning to meditate, I have been drawn to trees.
A day or two ago, I drove down the long hill on Broadway, leaving my office, descending to the Plaza and the Brush Creek area. The installation of this Corps of Engineers project insulted Kansas Citians by the stripping of old groves of trees. The walkway depicted in models as tree-lined had nothing at its inception but spindly newly-planted saplings with their wooden supports and delicate leaves. But now those tiny trees have grown, and as I turned the corner to traverse the northern edge of the creek, I smiled with the pleasure that a city dweller reserves for nature.
And then, under the swooping bough of one of the taller trees, I spied a scraggly three-some: Cross-legged, dirty, in tattered clothes, with piles of grungy belongings pushed to the middle of the group. I've seen them there before -- or ones like them. The homeless of Kansas City; the disenfranchised, the drop-outs, the derelict. My friend Katrina brings them food from her church's kitchen, and has even befriended several, including one who later met a sad and lonely death, famously, the news of which darkened the pages of our local paper for weeks on end. I have never joined her efforts; I have never approached the cluster of men who gather by the side of the Creek, passing around a bottle, or a plate of food from a nearby restaurant, or something crumbled in the depths of a paper bag.
I drove past the men without slowing, without even thinking about the protein bars in my purse that I could have stopped to give them. I averted my eyes from the filth of their clothes, and the streaks of grey in their uncut hair. I glanced back only once, before the light turned green, but from the angle at which I looked, I could see only glimpses of them through the thickness of the tree's summer crown. The light changed. I turned the corner, and made my way south, leaving them to whatever fate the evening held for them. I closed my eyes and drew in a little breath, feeling a small little clutch in the pit of my stomach, and unable to restrain myself from checking to be sure the windows were up and the doors were locked.
The rest of my trip home afforded me views of other trees, just as beautiful as the young ones on the Plaza's edge. Lining Brookside Boulevard and rising from the yards of the old homes, they stood tall, serene, undisturbed by gatherings of men with nowhere else to go to cool themselves. The occasional bench, situated in a carefully chosen spot, awaited a cheerful child or a tired dog-walker. But none appeared. The wind occasionally tossed the long branches. At stoplights on my route, I watched songbirds swoop from perch to verdant perch. Other than me, nobody seemed to be taking special note of the trees in my neighborhood. Nobody sought refuge under their boughs.
I pulled into my driveway, and found myself looking at the rising growth in my neighbor's yard. His trees tower over his rooftop, planted at the fresh start of our 100-year-old neighborhood. His children have grown, and nobody sits under his trees anymore. He has taken away the chairs that once rested at the base of his biggest maple, and let the yard reclaim the bare spot where his sons once played basketball far into the night.
The trees of my neighborhood endure. They shelter the homes in which we live our lives, the homes we vacuum, and clean, and decorate with meticulously chosen trinkets. Those trees sway in what little breezes kiss them, and send their wide shadows over our shingled houses, reaching high to block the sun and give us what coolness they can. But you never see anyone sitting, cross-legged and comfortable, unclean and unaware, in their comforting shade.
In the highest branches of my own maple, I see brown leaves, burnt, I imagine, by the brutal sun of our summer. The tree has regained most of its shape since being split by an ice storm years ago, and has spread wide, and grown taller, and its girth guards my house. As I sit, quiet, contemplative, on the deck, with my neck crooked back, a realization rises within me. But then the bird gives a final call, and whatever wisp of knowledge whispered in my soul slips away.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
A shrill bird sounds its six-note call high above our home. The impatiens have slightly wilted in their clay pots but have otherwise endured the vicious heat of the last week. I saved several pansies by transferring them from the open deck to the shade of the high-ceilinged porch, but the Gerber daisies droop on their wicker stands. In their lamentable state, they seem to reproach me.
I think about the aging cedar that we removed last year, and gaze over the railing at the holly bush struggling to rise in its place. Though the basement floor drain seems to run significantly better without a steady diet of cedar needles, I still miss the spindly, struggling majesty of the tree. From kindergarten's task of memorizing the Joyce Kilmer poem, to senior year, lying beneath a tree with my religion case, gazing into its boughs and learning to meditate, I have been drawn to trees.
A day or two ago, I drove down the long hill on Broadway, leaving my office, descending to the Plaza and the Brush Creek area. The installation of this Corps of Engineers project insulted Kansas Citians by the stripping of old groves of trees. The walkway depicted in models as tree-lined had nothing at its inception but spindly newly-planted saplings with their wooden supports and delicate leaves. But now those tiny trees have grown, and as I turned the corner to traverse the northern edge of the creek, I smiled with the pleasure that a city dweller reserves for nature.
And then, under the swooping bough of one of the taller trees, I spied a scraggly three-some: Cross-legged, dirty, in tattered clothes, with piles of grungy belongings pushed to the middle of the group. I've seen them there before -- or ones like them. The homeless of Kansas City; the disenfranchised, the drop-outs, the derelict. My friend Katrina brings them food from her church's kitchen, and has even befriended several, including one who later met a sad and lonely death, famously, the news of which darkened the pages of our local paper for weeks on end. I have never joined her efforts; I have never approached the cluster of men who gather by the side of the Creek, passing around a bottle, or a plate of food from a nearby restaurant, or something crumbled in the depths of a paper bag.
I drove past the men without slowing, without even thinking about the protein bars in my purse that I could have stopped to give them. I averted my eyes from the filth of their clothes, and the streaks of grey in their uncut hair. I glanced back only once, before the light turned green, but from the angle at which I looked, I could see only glimpses of them through the thickness of the tree's summer crown. The light changed. I turned the corner, and made my way south, leaving them to whatever fate the evening held for them. I closed my eyes and drew in a little breath, feeling a small little clutch in the pit of my stomach, and unable to restrain myself from checking to be sure the windows were up and the doors were locked.
The rest of my trip home afforded me views of other trees, just as beautiful as the young ones on the Plaza's edge. Lining Brookside Boulevard and rising from the yards of the old homes, they stood tall, serene, undisturbed by gatherings of men with nowhere else to go to cool themselves. The occasional bench, situated in a carefully chosen spot, awaited a cheerful child or a tired dog-walker. But none appeared. The wind occasionally tossed the long branches. At stoplights on my route, I watched songbirds swoop from perch to verdant perch. Other than me, nobody seemed to be taking special note of the trees in my neighborhood. Nobody sought refuge under their boughs.
I pulled into my driveway, and found myself looking at the rising growth in my neighbor's yard. His trees tower over his rooftop, planted at the fresh start of our 100-year-old neighborhood. His children have grown, and nobody sits under his trees anymore. He has taken away the chairs that once rested at the base of his biggest maple, and let the yard reclaim the bare spot where his sons once played basketball far into the night.
The trees of my neighborhood endure. They shelter the homes in which we live our lives, the homes we vacuum, and clean, and decorate with meticulously chosen trinkets. Those trees sway in what little breezes kiss them, and send their wide shadows over our shingled houses, reaching high to block the sun and give us what coolness they can. But you never see anyone sitting, cross-legged and comfortable, unclean and unaware, in their comforting shade.
In the highest branches of my own maple, I see brown leaves, burnt, I imagine, by the brutal sun of our summer. The tree has regained most of its shape since being split by an ice storm years ago, and has spread wide, and grown taller, and its girth guards my house. As I sit, quiet, contemplative, on the deck, with my neck crooked back, a realization rises within me. But then the bird gives a final call, and whatever wisp of knowledge whispered in my soul slips away.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Saturday Musings, 14 July 2012
Good morning,
The heat finally eased its relentless grasp on our lives. For the last few days, the morning's cool has stretched later than it had for weeks, and rain kissed the surfaces of our world. My foggy mood cleared.
But then I opened the newspaper on Thursday, and learned of the passing of one of the legends of my younger years, William F. O'Sullivan. Billy O. The last of the group of heroes who welcomed me into this often brutal life of law. I remember him best on a bar stool, cigarette in one hand, rocks glass in the other; or standing off to the side in a courtroom crowded with dark-suited defense lawyers, in his muted green serge, short-clipped hair, crinkled, deep blue eyes. Never less than cheerful; never without his grin. Billy O.
For Billy O's sake, or to appease the rise of bile within me at the thought of his death, I donned a dress and drove to a Catholic Church in Waldo yesterday. I parked against a barricade of concrete rubble, and tip-toed round the sign that said, "Sidewalk Closed", crossing over on a red light, ignoring the glares of drivers who had the right of way. I drew in a long, deep gulp of sweet, cool air and pulled the glass door outward, stepping across the threshold of the one place I have promised myself I wouldn't have to go. But for Billy O's sake, I dared.
I slipped passed the obligatory funeral guy, in his poorly fitted suit and somber expression. I gently placed my card into the waiting basket, beside the picture of Billy O and his wife, gleaming with love, unconcerned with the lens turned upon them. I dipped one knee, as only cradle Catholics do, and slipped into a pew, lowering my small frame onto the hard wooden bench just about the time a man high above the congregation started the next decade of the Rosary.
My eyes drifted around the church. I saw familiar faces. Silent men, lawyers who shared a stronger connection to Billy O than I do, by virtue of their having maintained the bond and not let it lapse through dint of inertia. Clutches of weeping women, some of whom I think must have worked at the courts. At the front, rows of family, people I did not know, his children who were small when I last saw them, grandchildren born long after I slipped out of the wide, welcoming swathe of Billy O's charm and became just another lawyer he helped along the way, with a life of my own, and my own album full of disappointments, dreams, and devilment.
To the right, a flat screen displayed a steady stream of pictures of the event's of Billy O's life: days on the dock; weddings; parades; parties; stolen, quiet moments. Billy O invited me to a few gatherings in his home, back in the day, but twenty-five years, three marriages, and a grown child have accumulated in my own album since then, and I did not recognize any of the scenes depicted in his memorial. Did I call him a friend? He had been, I suppose; but more than that, a mentor, and someone whom I would have been better for having not let slip from the pages of my life.
I felt a sob escape my lips, and rose. That little dip of the knee; a turn; and I stumbled back down the aisle. I saw people whom I have known for decades standing at the back of the church. I squeezed a few elbows, smiled back at a few faces, then thrust myself out into the air of a late summer afternoon.
As I drove home, sobbing, I scolded myself. I knew that my tears were not for Billy O but for the worthlessness of my sorrow. I had heard that Billy O was sick. I knew that he had had several ugly bouts of cancer over the years. Even as distant as I keep myself from the lawyers who occupied those past days, who sat on those bar stools and drank those tumblers of Scotch, I heard that he had worsened. And I made no effort then, and little effort now. I scrawled my name on the bottom of a card, beside that of the husband he never met, and made the funeral guy get the book out even though he told me he planned to display it after the service. I wrote a little note to Billy O's wife on the line beside my name, and left. I cried crocodile tears, more for my own failure than for the loss of Billy O, I think.
I parked my car behind our house, and turned to walk up the driveway. At that moment, my son's old white cat slipped from behind a bush, and soundlessly collapsed onto the asphalt. I hastened my step, and dropped my pocketbook. I saw her face, and knew that death was not done with me. I spoke her name, and she opened her eyes, and I bent down to put my hands on her. With a shudder, she died. My first thought was of my son; my second, that she must have been waiting for me to come home.
When Patrick left for college, he extracted a promise from me not to let any of the pets die before he graduated. I felt the press of my broken vow. On the telephone, sitting on my porch beside his little cat's silent form under its towel shroud, I told him that if he had only graduated a year early, I would have been able to keep that commitment.
My husband came home and we buried Sprinkles in the little pet cemetery on the side of our house, by Tiger, and Chief, and Chocolate. Her grave marker is a large rock stolen from Yellowstone National Park by Patrick and his friend Chris Taggart. She rests under the branches of a mysterious but beautiful bush which grows there, the bush that shades all of our fallen pets in their last sleep. I said a prayer for her, and thanked her for her years of service to my family. I closed my eyes, and sent a little thanks to Heaven, where I am sure Billy O sits by the side of a celestial lake, his tan legs stretched out, a dust of sand on his bare feet, a cold drink by his side, grinning that Billy O grin, raising his clear blue eyes to the wide patch of sky above him.
Muguwmpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
RIP Sprinkles, our first pet, 08 June 1994 - 13 July 2012. A life well lived.
The heat finally eased its relentless grasp on our lives. For the last few days, the morning's cool has stretched later than it had for weeks, and rain kissed the surfaces of our world. My foggy mood cleared.
But then I opened the newspaper on Thursday, and learned of the passing of one of the legends of my younger years, William F. O'Sullivan. Billy O. The last of the group of heroes who welcomed me into this often brutal life of law. I remember him best on a bar stool, cigarette in one hand, rocks glass in the other; or standing off to the side in a courtroom crowded with dark-suited defense lawyers, in his muted green serge, short-clipped hair, crinkled, deep blue eyes. Never less than cheerful; never without his grin. Billy O.
For Billy O's sake, or to appease the rise of bile within me at the thought of his death, I donned a dress and drove to a Catholic Church in Waldo yesterday. I parked against a barricade of concrete rubble, and tip-toed round the sign that said, "Sidewalk Closed", crossing over on a red light, ignoring the glares of drivers who had the right of way. I drew in a long, deep gulp of sweet, cool air and pulled the glass door outward, stepping across the threshold of the one place I have promised myself I wouldn't have to go. But for Billy O's sake, I dared.
I slipped passed the obligatory funeral guy, in his poorly fitted suit and somber expression. I gently placed my card into the waiting basket, beside the picture of Billy O and his wife, gleaming with love, unconcerned with the lens turned upon them. I dipped one knee, as only cradle Catholics do, and slipped into a pew, lowering my small frame onto the hard wooden bench just about the time a man high above the congregation started the next decade of the Rosary.
My eyes drifted around the church. I saw familiar faces. Silent men, lawyers who shared a stronger connection to Billy O than I do, by virtue of their having maintained the bond and not let it lapse through dint of inertia. Clutches of weeping women, some of whom I think must have worked at the courts. At the front, rows of family, people I did not know, his children who were small when I last saw them, grandchildren born long after I slipped out of the wide, welcoming swathe of Billy O's charm and became just another lawyer he helped along the way, with a life of my own, and my own album full of disappointments, dreams, and devilment.
To the right, a flat screen displayed a steady stream of pictures of the event's of Billy O's life: days on the dock; weddings; parades; parties; stolen, quiet moments. Billy O invited me to a few gatherings in his home, back in the day, but twenty-five years, three marriages, and a grown child have accumulated in my own album since then, and I did not recognize any of the scenes depicted in his memorial. Did I call him a friend? He had been, I suppose; but more than that, a mentor, and someone whom I would have been better for having not let slip from the pages of my life.
I felt a sob escape my lips, and rose. That little dip of the knee; a turn; and I stumbled back down the aisle. I saw people whom I have known for decades standing at the back of the church. I squeezed a few elbows, smiled back at a few faces, then thrust myself out into the air of a late summer afternoon.
As I drove home, sobbing, I scolded myself. I knew that my tears were not for Billy O but for the worthlessness of my sorrow. I had heard that Billy O was sick. I knew that he had had several ugly bouts of cancer over the years. Even as distant as I keep myself from the lawyers who occupied those past days, who sat on those bar stools and drank those tumblers of Scotch, I heard that he had worsened. And I made no effort then, and little effort now. I scrawled my name on the bottom of a card, beside that of the husband he never met, and made the funeral guy get the book out even though he told me he planned to display it after the service. I wrote a little note to Billy O's wife on the line beside my name, and left. I cried crocodile tears, more for my own failure than for the loss of Billy O, I think.
I parked my car behind our house, and turned to walk up the driveway. At that moment, my son's old white cat slipped from behind a bush, and soundlessly collapsed onto the asphalt. I hastened my step, and dropped my pocketbook. I saw her face, and knew that death was not done with me. I spoke her name, and she opened her eyes, and I bent down to put my hands on her. With a shudder, she died. My first thought was of my son; my second, that she must have been waiting for me to come home.
When Patrick left for college, he extracted a promise from me not to let any of the pets die before he graduated. I felt the press of my broken vow. On the telephone, sitting on my porch beside his little cat's silent form under its towel shroud, I told him that if he had only graduated a year early, I would have been able to keep that commitment.
My husband came home and we buried Sprinkles in the little pet cemetery on the side of our house, by Tiger, and Chief, and Chocolate. Her grave marker is a large rock stolen from Yellowstone National Park by Patrick and his friend Chris Taggart. She rests under the branches of a mysterious but beautiful bush which grows there, the bush that shades all of our fallen pets in their last sleep. I said a prayer for her, and thanked her for her years of service to my family. I closed my eyes, and sent a little thanks to Heaven, where I am sure Billy O sits by the side of a celestial lake, his tan legs stretched out, a dust of sand on his bare feet, a cold drink by his side, grinning that Billy O grin, raising his clear blue eyes to the wide patch of sky above him.
Muguwmpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
RIP Sprinkles, our first pet, 08 June 1994 - 13 July 2012. A life well lived.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Saturday Musings, 07 July 2012
Good morning,
The heat has broken, at least for one sweet morning, though the potted plants on my deck have shriveled despite the constant watering and desperate deployment of a spray bottle. A few petunias gamely struggle; the begonias sighed and died; the Gerber daisies have shriveled; one of the two bright pink plants, the names of which I no longer recall, turned to dusty shreds. The other has blackened buds, hard and sad, that foretell its pending demise. I should have brought the plants into the house when the heat wave struck, I tell myself; now it is too late.
In times past, when the children whose high, happy voices gave vibrant life to this home cavorted in the driveway, we dragged a large pool to the backyard, stood it in the middle of a twelve-foot wide sand pile, and created our own beach. A Little Tykes slide angled over the side of the pool into the shimmering water. In a box, in the attic maybe -- or on a high shelf in the basement -- pictures of those summers rest against old letters, fading drawings made from Cray Pas, and gilded, ribbonned, letters of commendation.
As I conspired with him the other day to orchestrate a repair to a much-cherished guitar belonging to my son, my friend Alan paused and raised his hand. Do you remember this, he said, palm turned towards me, keeping me still, while Alan summoned the memory. Do you remember when you said, "A boy? What on earth am I going to do with a boy?"
I remember.
I lay in a gigantic heap, on a gurney, in a sterile room in Little Rock, at the University of Arkansas' genetic testing laboratory. A technician sat on a low stool between me and a monitor, with an ultra sound wand in one gloved hand, the head of the wand pressed against my belly. Do you want to know the gender, she asked. No, I don't, I replied. It's a boy! she crowed, unable to contain herself.
A boy? A boy? What on earth am I going to do with a boy?
I have my answer now.
With that boy, I learned so many life's lessons that they fill my heart and spill out into the world around me.
That boy announced, in a baby's voice, that he would be the one to get the newspaper from our apartment doorstep, the first winter we moved back to Kansas City. He could barely reach the knob of our front door, but turn it he did. He bent down to get the Kansas City Star for me, the January before he turned two, and each day thereafter until we moved in May. Your legs don't work so good, Mommy, he told me. Patrick get the paper for you.
When I fell on the ice at the end of our driveway, in the home we bought that year, he toddled down the street to our neighbors' home down to get help. He was two and a half.
When I tripped over a gutter hiding under the snow in the dog run one dark night the next winter, that boy felt that I had been outside too long, and telephoned the same neighbor. All ten of my toes were broken. The neighbor found me lying, nearing numbness, at the side of the house on a bed of crystalline snow.
At five, that boy reached down into a hotel swimming pool to grab my shoulder as I sputtered and struggled, gasping for breath, my spastic legs unable to propel me from the deep end. He held me out of the water, patiently waiting for someone to come. A passing guest saw this stunning tableau through the large glass window that fronted on the lobby, and ran into the pool area. Through my coughing, as I sagged against the concrete, I heard the man say, You did good, son, you did real good. Your Mom's going to be okay.
With that boy, I climbed a mountain, conquered my fear of heights, and stood on the edge of a canyon to watch a cluster of birds swoop into the depths from which we had come.
Beside that boy, I journeyed deep into Carlsbad Cavern, beyond the accessible trail, raising my eyes to see the wondrous formations above me, slithering through narrow passages, my hand in his small one, his seven-year-old frame leading the way.
I traversed uneven ground, leaning on a walker, with a newly operated knee, to see that boy receive his Arrow of Light, which to this day nestles in a box on my dresser.
I walked the halls of the Mayo Clinic with that boy, and watched him pedal his bike around a lake in Rochester. I laughed when he asked if we could live in that hotel forever. With that boy, I sat in a small office to hear the verdict: The doctors in Kansas City were wrong. Your boy does not have Addison's disease.
A year later, I ignored that boy's determined refusal to board a plane to Mexico, despite the weeks of planning, the months of speaking Spanish by text message, the doctor's clearance to travel, the hours of filling out paperwork for the scholarship. I ignored his expressions of apprehension. I knew the time for him to fly had arrived.
Six weeks later, I barely recognized him as he followed other passengers into the waiting area, with his dark tan, his once-long hair now in short, thick curls around his head. I was not just the tallest kid in the group, he chuckled. I was the tallest person in the whole country! Later, after we dropped off the friend who had ridden to the airport with me, he softly admitted: I am so glad you made me go!
I quietly listened to that boy tell me a classmate had said that he was "too white to go to this school", and I smiled, three years later, when that boy was elected president of his senior class. There were five candidates, he said, dismissively. I just split the vote. Still.
I slid into a ditch in a blizzard with that boy, en route to my cousin's funeral, our hearts racing. We looked at each other with something between terror and glee. With the white raging all around us, we crept up the exit ramp in our Chevy Blazer, slowly edging into the parking lot of a restaurant, where we ordered soup and waited out the storm.
That boy has walked me down two aisles, visited me in three hospitals, traveled to ten or twelve states with me, and invented characters and voices to make me laugh in times when my despair permeated the air.
I walked across urban Chicago campuses with that boy, assuring him that yes, he could manage far from home. I stood at the entry to a broad green campus, in Indiana, in March of 2009, and told him that we would find a way to make his attendance there happen.
I watched him struggle through that first year of college, and regroup, the summer after.
I watched him soar for the next two years, with friends, heartbreaks, good grades, and a crummy summer job from which he learned a valuable lesson. I have read the stories published under his name in his campus literary review, year after year. I've sat in a distant room, listening to the increasingly complex sounds of his guitar.
And a month ago, I packed that Chevy Blazer, and sent him off to Hollywood.
At 1:50 p.m., CDST, on Sunday, 08 July 2012, that boy will vanish. He will be 21 at that very moment. He will stand as he has always stood despite his many fears and trepidations: Smiling that slight, steady smile. Determined, strong, capable. And at long last, I will have my answer.
What on earth am I going to do with a boy?
Watch him grow to be a man.
Happy Birthday, Patrick Charles Corley. My pride in you is boundless.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The heat has broken, at least for one sweet morning, though the potted plants on my deck have shriveled despite the constant watering and desperate deployment of a spray bottle. A few petunias gamely struggle; the begonias sighed and died; the Gerber daisies have shriveled; one of the two bright pink plants, the names of which I no longer recall, turned to dusty shreds. The other has blackened buds, hard and sad, that foretell its pending demise. I should have brought the plants into the house when the heat wave struck, I tell myself; now it is too late.
In times past, when the children whose high, happy voices gave vibrant life to this home cavorted in the driveway, we dragged a large pool to the backyard, stood it in the middle of a twelve-foot wide sand pile, and created our own beach. A Little Tykes slide angled over the side of the pool into the shimmering water. In a box, in the attic maybe -- or on a high shelf in the basement -- pictures of those summers rest against old letters, fading drawings made from Cray Pas, and gilded, ribbonned, letters of commendation.
As I conspired with him the other day to orchestrate a repair to a much-cherished guitar belonging to my son, my friend Alan paused and raised his hand. Do you remember this, he said, palm turned towards me, keeping me still, while Alan summoned the memory. Do you remember when you said, "A boy? What on earth am I going to do with a boy?"
I remember.
I lay in a gigantic heap, on a gurney, in a sterile room in Little Rock, at the University of Arkansas' genetic testing laboratory. A technician sat on a low stool between me and a monitor, with an ultra sound wand in one gloved hand, the head of the wand pressed against my belly. Do you want to know the gender, she asked. No, I don't, I replied. It's a boy! she crowed, unable to contain herself.
A boy? A boy? What on earth am I going to do with a boy?
I have my answer now.
With that boy, I learned so many life's lessons that they fill my heart and spill out into the world around me.
That boy announced, in a baby's voice, that he would be the one to get the newspaper from our apartment doorstep, the first winter we moved back to Kansas City. He could barely reach the knob of our front door, but turn it he did. He bent down to get the Kansas City Star for me, the January before he turned two, and each day thereafter until we moved in May. Your legs don't work so good, Mommy, he told me. Patrick get the paper for you.
When I fell on the ice at the end of our driveway, in the home we bought that year, he toddled down the street to our neighbors' home down to get help. He was two and a half.
When I tripped over a gutter hiding under the snow in the dog run one dark night the next winter, that boy felt that I had been outside too long, and telephoned the same neighbor. All ten of my toes were broken. The neighbor found me lying, nearing numbness, at the side of the house on a bed of crystalline snow.
At five, that boy reached down into a hotel swimming pool to grab my shoulder as I sputtered and struggled, gasping for breath, my spastic legs unable to propel me from the deep end. He held me out of the water, patiently waiting for someone to come. A passing guest saw this stunning tableau through the large glass window that fronted on the lobby, and ran into the pool area. Through my coughing, as I sagged against the concrete, I heard the man say, You did good, son, you did real good. Your Mom's going to be okay.
With that boy, I climbed a mountain, conquered my fear of heights, and stood on the edge of a canyon to watch a cluster of birds swoop into the depths from which we had come.
Beside that boy, I journeyed deep into Carlsbad Cavern, beyond the accessible trail, raising my eyes to see the wondrous formations above me, slithering through narrow passages, my hand in his small one, his seven-year-old frame leading the way.
I traversed uneven ground, leaning on a walker, with a newly operated knee, to see that boy receive his Arrow of Light, which to this day nestles in a box on my dresser.
I walked the halls of the Mayo Clinic with that boy, and watched him pedal his bike around a lake in Rochester. I laughed when he asked if we could live in that hotel forever. With that boy, I sat in a small office to hear the verdict: The doctors in Kansas City were wrong. Your boy does not have Addison's disease.
A year later, I ignored that boy's determined refusal to board a plane to Mexico, despite the weeks of planning, the months of speaking Spanish by text message, the doctor's clearance to travel, the hours of filling out paperwork for the scholarship. I ignored his expressions of apprehension. I knew the time for him to fly had arrived.
Six weeks later, I barely recognized him as he followed other passengers into the waiting area, with his dark tan, his once-long hair now in short, thick curls around his head. I was not just the tallest kid in the group, he chuckled. I was the tallest person in the whole country! Later, after we dropped off the friend who had ridden to the airport with me, he softly admitted: I am so glad you made me go!
I quietly listened to that boy tell me a classmate had said that he was "too white to go to this school", and I smiled, three years later, when that boy was elected president of his senior class. There were five candidates, he said, dismissively. I just split the vote. Still.
I slid into a ditch in a blizzard with that boy, en route to my cousin's funeral, our hearts racing. We looked at each other with something between terror and glee. With the white raging all around us, we crept up the exit ramp in our Chevy Blazer, slowly edging into the parking lot of a restaurant, where we ordered soup and waited out the storm.
That boy has walked me down two aisles, visited me in three hospitals, traveled to ten or twelve states with me, and invented characters and voices to make me laugh in times when my despair permeated the air.
I walked across urban Chicago campuses with that boy, assuring him that yes, he could manage far from home. I stood at the entry to a broad green campus, in Indiana, in March of 2009, and told him that we would find a way to make his attendance there happen.
I watched him struggle through that first year of college, and regroup, the summer after.
I watched him soar for the next two years, with friends, heartbreaks, good grades, and a crummy summer job from which he learned a valuable lesson. I have read the stories published under his name in his campus literary review, year after year. I've sat in a distant room, listening to the increasingly complex sounds of his guitar.
And a month ago, I packed that Chevy Blazer, and sent him off to Hollywood.
At 1:50 p.m., CDST, on Sunday, 08 July 2012, that boy will vanish. He will be 21 at that very moment. He will stand as he has always stood despite his many fears and trepidations: Smiling that slight, steady smile. Determined, strong, capable. And at long last, I will have my answer.
What on earth am I going to do with a boy?
Watch him grow to be a man.
Happy Birthday, Patrick Charles Corley. My pride in you is boundless.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Saturday Musings, 30 June 2012
Good morning,
The week provided numerous opportunities for one's blood pressure to soar or sink. The Affordable Care Act received Supreme Court blessing, as did lying about one's service. A judge looked on me with amusement, providing a brief glance of humanity that I desperately needed at just that moment. An old friend and I sat over coffee for a near-record three and a half hours. My son posted on my Facebook timeline. Yet another of our cars got bashed by speeders using Holmes for a closed course, this time, thankfully, an honest one who stayed to provide his information. And the white cat, aging, sweet and small, began sleeping in the driveway, necessitating a stop-and-search each time we traverse the asphalt.
Among all the hot summers that I have spent, Kansas City in 2012 affords some of the more trying times. My car's air conditioning failed a few weeks ago, and I have been too busy to make an appointment for its repair. I have arrived at distant hearings with my blouse clinging to my skin, grateful to slip on a jacket to hide my discomfort, shedding the outer layer before climbing into the driver's seat for the long ride home. A mixed bag, busy-ness: I'm sure to "make my month" but less sure to survive it.
I have reinvented myself so many times in my five-plus decades that I feel as though I'm just hitting my stride in this version of myself. A younger woman would be thrilled at the serge in client-base and the reliability of payment exhibited by this current batch. A younger woman would thrive on the ten-hour workdays and early morning coffees. But I am not a younger woman, and while my hair might be properly tinted to disguise my age, I feel it in every step, every reach, every twist of my wretched ankles. I'm not complaining, God, just wondering if I can earn this bounty you've seen fit to send my way. And keep it coming. Knock wood.
I closed my eyes to pull some strength from the bowels of my body yesterday, as I tried to clip a 14-page brief down to the five-page limit in the rules. I made it to ten, and edited the title, body and prayer to include a request for leave to file over-length Suggestions. I glanced at the motion to which I was responding, wondering how my opposing counsel had managed to keep within the locally dictated limit. Ah. Single-spaced! I could not resist adding a footnote to my own plaintive plea, noting the sneaky, possibly impermissible dodge. I deleted the footnote, re-added, deleted, then finally left it. Catty, but perhaps it will tip the scales in my favor. I recalled a judge who once hefted a brief-in-a-binder filed by a fancy St. Louis firm. Ms. Corley is granted leave to file a 5-lb opposition, with or without binder, he intoned, and if I had not already witnessed his wicked sense of humor, I might have missed it.
Heat seeps into your skin here in the city. But in the mountains, the occasional stirring of the air by a breeze coming through tall old evergreens saves you. On a screen porch, overlooking the river, as the night falls and the small animals skitter through the underbrush, summer settles like a tired guest in the gathering dark. Heat shimmers in the day but whispers after nightfall, yielding to the earth's need for temperance. The rocking chairs stir the air.
By morning, in the mountains, in the summer, the air registers seventy. A few hours after breakfast, your hair falls in lanky strings to your shoulders, and you hitch your shirt in a knot above your belly. You slide your feet into shoes that barely earn the name, and roll your jeans to your knees or tear them into ragged shorts. You walk along the dusty roads, around the square, to sit in the last open restaurant and drink Pepsi-Cola. The ladies in their cotton skirts pour endless cups of coffee, and the men in overalls complain, with utter lack of conviction, about the heat and what it might do to the crops. They watch for clouds to gather in the distance, and speculate on what those puffy images might hold.
You shuffle back to your home, and glance at the box on your door to see if anyone has been by. You know that running a small-town law office out of your house has little to commend it and much to suggest that a city girl should not attempt it. But the heat has taken hold of your common sense and wrung it dry, so for the afternoon, you visit the library in the basement of City Hall next door and play jacks with the mayor's granddaughter. You've read all the books but you borrow one or two anyway, just to give the mayor something to do. She writes your name carefully on the borrowing card, as though there are lots of strangers wanting to check out books and she might lose track. You thank her, ruffle the little girl's hair, and go back to your home, to the empty rooms and the wilted plants on the rail.
And you take endless showers, even though you're only three houses down from the city water treatment plan, and your hair has long since taken on a funky hue, where L'Oreal meets Chlorine. You don't care. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, you've heard.
Then the night settles again, and you slip onto the screened-in room at the back of the house, and listen to the soft sound of the river below rising to meet the rustle in the endlessly rising, aging pine trees. You lean back against the chair and let yourself be lulled into quietude, as the heat of the day dissipates, and in the distance, the sound of a summer storm rolls into town. You close your eyes and smile, knowing that in the coffee shop tomorrow, you'll hear the men arguing about whether the rain helped the crops or not.
The Kansas City heat of 2012 has not yet been broken by thunder. We reached 107 two days ago, but tomorrow we should drop into double-digits. We've taken to leaving water on the porch for our cats, and in the early afternoon, our eighteen-year-old, home between work and his evening's activities, lets our silly old Beagle into the house to spend the hottest part of the day. She moves more rapidly than she should, flops down onto her bed, and glances around, confused, no doubt, at the sudden opportunity to be cool.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The week provided numerous opportunities for one's blood pressure to soar or sink. The Affordable Care Act received Supreme Court blessing, as did lying about one's service. A judge looked on me with amusement, providing a brief glance of humanity that I desperately needed at just that moment. An old friend and I sat over coffee for a near-record three and a half hours. My son posted on my Facebook timeline. Yet another of our cars got bashed by speeders using Holmes for a closed course, this time, thankfully, an honest one who stayed to provide his information. And the white cat, aging, sweet and small, began sleeping in the driveway, necessitating a stop-and-search each time we traverse the asphalt.
Among all the hot summers that I have spent, Kansas City in 2012 affords some of the more trying times. My car's air conditioning failed a few weeks ago, and I have been too busy to make an appointment for its repair. I have arrived at distant hearings with my blouse clinging to my skin, grateful to slip on a jacket to hide my discomfort, shedding the outer layer before climbing into the driver's seat for the long ride home. A mixed bag, busy-ness: I'm sure to "make my month" but less sure to survive it.
I have reinvented myself so many times in my five-plus decades that I feel as though I'm just hitting my stride in this version of myself. A younger woman would be thrilled at the serge in client-base and the reliability of payment exhibited by this current batch. A younger woman would thrive on the ten-hour workdays and early morning coffees. But I am not a younger woman, and while my hair might be properly tinted to disguise my age, I feel it in every step, every reach, every twist of my wretched ankles. I'm not complaining, God, just wondering if I can earn this bounty you've seen fit to send my way. And keep it coming. Knock wood.
I closed my eyes to pull some strength from the bowels of my body yesterday, as I tried to clip a 14-page brief down to the five-page limit in the rules. I made it to ten, and edited the title, body and prayer to include a request for leave to file over-length Suggestions. I glanced at the motion to which I was responding, wondering how my opposing counsel had managed to keep within the locally dictated limit. Ah. Single-spaced! I could not resist adding a footnote to my own plaintive plea, noting the sneaky, possibly impermissible dodge. I deleted the footnote, re-added, deleted, then finally left it. Catty, but perhaps it will tip the scales in my favor. I recalled a judge who once hefted a brief-in-a-binder filed by a fancy St. Louis firm. Ms. Corley is granted leave to file a 5-lb opposition, with or without binder, he intoned, and if I had not already witnessed his wicked sense of humor, I might have missed it.
Heat seeps into your skin here in the city. But in the mountains, the occasional stirring of the air by a breeze coming through tall old evergreens saves you. On a screen porch, overlooking the river, as the night falls and the small animals skitter through the underbrush, summer settles like a tired guest in the gathering dark. Heat shimmers in the day but whispers after nightfall, yielding to the earth's need for temperance. The rocking chairs stir the air.
By morning, in the mountains, in the summer, the air registers seventy. A few hours after breakfast, your hair falls in lanky strings to your shoulders, and you hitch your shirt in a knot above your belly. You slide your feet into shoes that barely earn the name, and roll your jeans to your knees or tear them into ragged shorts. You walk along the dusty roads, around the square, to sit in the last open restaurant and drink Pepsi-Cola. The ladies in their cotton skirts pour endless cups of coffee, and the men in overalls complain, with utter lack of conviction, about the heat and what it might do to the crops. They watch for clouds to gather in the distance, and speculate on what those puffy images might hold.
You shuffle back to your home, and glance at the box on your door to see if anyone has been by. You know that running a small-town law office out of your house has little to commend it and much to suggest that a city girl should not attempt it. But the heat has taken hold of your common sense and wrung it dry, so for the afternoon, you visit the library in the basement of City Hall next door and play jacks with the mayor's granddaughter. You've read all the books but you borrow one or two anyway, just to give the mayor something to do. She writes your name carefully on the borrowing card, as though there are lots of strangers wanting to check out books and she might lose track. You thank her, ruffle the little girl's hair, and go back to your home, to the empty rooms and the wilted plants on the rail.
And you take endless showers, even though you're only three houses down from the city water treatment plan, and your hair has long since taken on a funky hue, where L'Oreal meets Chlorine. You don't care. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, you've heard.
Then the night settles again, and you slip onto the screened-in room at the back of the house, and listen to the soft sound of the river below rising to meet the rustle in the endlessly rising, aging pine trees. You lean back against the chair and let yourself be lulled into quietude, as the heat of the day dissipates, and in the distance, the sound of a summer storm rolls into town. You close your eyes and smile, knowing that in the coffee shop tomorrow, you'll hear the men arguing about whether the rain helped the crops or not.
The Kansas City heat of 2012 has not yet been broken by thunder. We reached 107 two days ago, but tomorrow we should drop into double-digits. We've taken to leaving water on the porch for our cats, and in the early afternoon, our eighteen-year-old, home between work and his evening's activities, lets our silly old Beagle into the house to spend the hottest part of the day. She moves more rapidly than she should, flops down onto her bed, and glances around, confused, no doubt, at the sudden opportunity to be cool.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
Monday, June 25, 2012
The Past Revisited: From August 2009
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 6:16 AM, Corinne Corley wrote:
Good morning,
It is still pitch black, too dark to venture onto my porch, so I am writing this from the breakfast nook of my airplane bungalow in Brookside.
For those of you who have not visited Kansas City or who are otherwise unfamiliar with the Craftsman Airplane Bungalow, this is a style of house that has its porch on the side, making the house resemble a one-winged airplane. In all of the houses in my neighborhood, the living room and dining room form an "L" shape, and there is a small nook, usually with original built-ins, between the dining room and the kitchen.
When I bought this house, the nook contained a white formica-top table, custom-built by the previous owner's father. Four sturdy white ladder-back chairs surrounded it, and at that table, my son ate most of his meals until 1997, when a small bequest from his uncle Stephen allowed us to get our first computer. Thereafter, meals were taken in the dining room, and the nook became Corinne's grotto.
You could not call this a room, although we often refer to it as my "office", in the Les Nessman sense of a private space that no one can invade without permission. I keep my angel collection on a shelf on the west wall, and to the east is a two-tiered wooden cabinet containing some Limoges and Haviland pieces that I inherited from my mother, including the seven-inch salad plate that my brother Mark and I purchased for eight dollars and gave her for Mother's Day forty years ago. My writing desk and an oak printer stand are crammed against the northwall, where the window opens onto the neighbor's rose trellis.
On the wall to the left of the window in front of me is a picture of my son at age 8, beneath which is a picture of a radiant Uncle Steve taken years ago, when we were all too young to know what the future held. To the right of the window is a small plaque that Patrick made, which reads, "Many hands make light work,". Beneath this wise observation is a picture of my son at age 6, framed with a poem written in his hand, constructed from his the letters of his name, which reads, "Patient, Adventurous, Talented, Remarkable, Intelligent, Casual, Kind".
Patrick.
You knew I'd get there, didn't you -- how could I not?
But let me tell you something else first. Let me tell you about a cartoon called "Ed, Edd and Eddie", which is the story of three boys who are constant companions in one wild adventure after another. My son and I used to watch this cartoon together. In one episode, Ed is going to move out of the neighborhood and Edd laments the impending departure, wailing: "Who will push me on the swings? Who will butter my toast?" We found this line amusing, mimicking it whenever one of us left for the store, or work, or to go to the movies. Who will butter my toast, we had only to say, and peals of giggles or laughter would follow.
Patrick left for college this weekend. Penny Thieme and I drove him to Greencastle, Indiana. It is only fitting that Penny should be the one who accompanied us, since his summer and winter breaks during elementary school were spent with Aunt Penny and Uncle Ben. The two of them are golden threads shot through the tapestry of his life, and hers weaves long and strong through the patterns emerging from each motion of the shuttle. All of his aunts, by birth and by choice, have had special places in Patrick's formation, but Aunt Penny in particular imparted many lessons to Patrick that mothers just cannot convey. They share art, and they share memories of late-night movies, and they have an ease of being that I quite frankly envy. And she is calm and accepting, a perfect foil for my fussy personality. I knew I would need her strength on this trip.
The mound of stuff that we jammed into the Saturn astounded me. A refrigerator, a microwave, a cofee pot, a suitcase, three jam-packed duffle bags, an amp, two guitars, the pedal for the electric guitar, $150.00 worth of food from Costco, a butterfly chair, bedding, towels, a lamp, a waste-basket, and every drug store item that Katrina or I imagined he might need. I cleverly packed all the little things inside of containers that could serve duo purposes in a dorm room, and with Patrick and Penny, I leveraged each item into a nook, cranny or airpocket.
Only a few things got left behind, most of which were replaced in Greencastle. The electric guitar stand, I discovered on the hearth on my return last evening, and it will get shipped, along with his Dali posters, in the first care package.
The trip from Kansas City to St. Louis was uneventful. We found the Iron Barley without incident, and enjoyed an hour or so with my sister Joyce and her daughter Lisa. By seven Friday evening, we had arrived at the Holiday Inn in Cloverdale, where the three of us, hyped to the gills with road buzz, ate bananas, reminisced about Patrick's childhood, and talked of college until much later than we should have.
The system for off-loading freshman belongings is pretty remarkable at DePauw University. The parent is instructed to pull up as close to the student's dorm as possible, and to then deposit all of the student's possessions onto the sidewalk. The student -- or an auxiliary family member -- stations himself by the pile while you park the car, and then you commence sequential trips with armloads of boxes, bundles and baggage to and from your allocated square of cement. In that way, everything you've gathered to make the next nine months as comfortable as the first nine, gets transferred from sidewalk to room with an efficiency that amazed me.
In case you haven't seen a dorm room at DePauw University -- or anywhere else -- a single is 7 feet, 5 inches by 11 feet, 4 inches. It is a cement-block cube which contains a super-long twin bed, a plain desk with obligatory hutch, a bookshelf and a dresser, all made of solid, very heavy wood. As arranged by the housing staff, the dresser flanks one wall, across from which are the desk with its chair and two-shelf hutch, next to the dresser topped by the bookshelf. There are 18 inches of floor space between the two ordered rows of furniture spanning the length of the room.
While Patrick and I engaged in some parent-and-entering-freshman task, Penny decided that a different arrangement would be more commodious, as a consequence of which, the desk, bed and dresser formed a "C" and allowed for three square feet of moving room. With that framework, we were able to unpack everything, including shoving the bookshelf into the closet to serve as shelves for all that food, while stacking the fridge and microwave on the dresser. A corner was co-opted for the folding canvas chair; and the six inches between the bed and the dresser held the amp.
With everything unpacked, hung up, stashed and stored, we left the room to go to the convocation. As he locked the door of his room for the first time, I remarked to Patrick, "It's like you have your own apartment." Came the rapid reply: "Yes, a really really tiny one." As I laughed, he asked, "Do you know how many square feet the room is?" I had to confess that yes, I did -- about 77-1/2. "Yeah," he sighed. "But at least my amp fit."
We all have our priorities. I had felt the same way about the Costco goods -- my boy can surely survive the first month, I kept telling myself. Club crackers and peanut butter.
The students separated from their parents for the convocation. Penny and I drifted casually down to the performing arts center. A large volunteer, the first nominally unfriendly one I saw, tried to prevent me from entering the auditorium. "You can go to the balcony," she said. I looked at the two steep flights of open metal stairs. Impossible. She then gestured to a side room. "Then go over to Moore Annex, and you can view it on video."
Video? Watch the convocation on video? They had to be joking.
Of course, I did not yet know what a "convocation" was. Had I been quick, I might have explored the Internet to learn the meaning of this word. However, I knew from the weekend activity guide that the school president would be speaking, so I assumed it was an important event. This, I would not watch on video.
I am not ashamed to say that I played the ADA card, and got a seat on the main floor.
There we were ushered, Aunt Penny and I, into the midst of parents who had arrived early enough to get a seat in the best section without being pushy. Luckily, several chairs were still empty in the middle of the second row beyond the bank of seats reserved for the students, and into these the chastened volunteer led us. As we waited, the lights dimmed, and a huge screen dropped from the ceiling. A video began to play, depicting various members of the academic community talking about DePauw in reverent tones, or with animated voices, or with quiet confidence. I found their enthusiasm intriguing, and began to suspect that Patrick had chosen a very good place indeed.
And then the screen went blank. A hush descended over the assembly.
Seconds later, live feed commenced. I didn't understand what I was seeing, at first. But the parents around me began murmuring, and the sound of applause swelled. I squinted, furrowed my brow, peered intently at the images before me and suddenly, I realized what was happening -- and my friends, I began to cry.
The entire faculty of DePauw University had formed two lines in the long hallway outside of the auditorium in which I sat. The doors to the Center stood opened. Through those doors, one by one, in slow single file, came the Class of 2013, and as they processed into the building, they were given a standing ovation by their professors.
As the eight-hundred members of my son's class entered the auditorium, the waiting families began to clap as well. The acclamation resonated through the high-ceilinged room; the thunderous praise rang from the seats of parents, grandparents, guardians, siblings, uncles and aunts in the lower rows, rising to meet the roar from the balcony. My hands ached from clapping and still the students came, and still the faculty applauded, and still I cried, until each freshman had entered. Then the faculty entered and the students returned the ovation as the stage filled with professors, and deans, and assistants, and even the student body president. The applause continued until each and every one of them reached their designated place, and then, in one grand moment, everyone sat -- and the hall was silent.
Speeches followed, some of which were tender and poignant. Poetry was read; advice dispensed; greetings spoken. In due course, we exited the hall and our children continued with freshman activities while we shoved soggy handkerchiefs into our pockets and marveled among ourselves that DePauw surely knows how to do things right.
At the appointed hour, we returned to the smallest apartment on the planet, for the hour designated on the written agenda to Say Goodbye to Families. The last few items had been purchased at CVS in a mad dash, and promises had been extracted -- take your medicine, wear your glasses, listen to your mentor, study hard, take good care of yourself. I walked out of his dorm room, followed by his beloved Penny.
I would not have heard him if the suite had not been empty, but it was. And so, I did hear him when he said, in the very quietest of little-boy-whispers, from inside his allocated seventy-seven square feet,
"Who will push me on the swings. . . who will butter my toast?"
We laughed, then, my nearly-six-feet tall son and I; and he let me hug him, and we all went down to the car. A few last things were shoved into his hands -- more cash; the paper from the freshmen service project; a copy of the housing contract. We scrambled to find his glasses; Penny teased him about girls; and, too quickly, with a casual flick of his hand, he turned, and walked back into Hogate Hall. I was left standing on the sidewalk where once his pile of stuff had been, wondering what on earth I was thinking, leaving my only child in a strange place eight hours from home, with nothing more to protect him than his inherited charm and unlimited Verizon Wireless texting.
In my heart of hearts, I know my fears are unfounded. He will suffer no more indignities than any young man starting college; and he will have as many glorious moments of stunning self-discovery. He will come home taller, more self-confident, and with a new hair cut that some cute freshman girl decides to make him to get. There will eventually come a holiday that he does not spend with me; and then he will do a winter term abroad; and, eventually, I will turn his bedroom into a sewing room, or a library, or a storage space for broken suitcases.
The weaver chooses her patterns, and the threads from which her work will be constructed. Not so the parent. We are more akin to the sculptor -- or perhaps the puppeteer. Like Giuseppe, I wanted a real boy, and that is precisely what I got. He has come to life now -- and I would not stop his dancing if I could.
Mugwumpishly tendered, written on my iBook G4, in my empty nest, in Brookside, Kansas City, Missouri, on this 24th day of August, in the year 2009.
Corinne Corley
Good morning,
It is still pitch black, too dark to venture onto my porch, so I am writing this from the breakfast nook of my airplane bungalow in Brookside.
For those of you who have not visited Kansas City or who are otherwise unfamiliar with the Craftsman Airplane Bungalow, this is a style of house that has its porch on the side, making the house resemble a one-winged airplane. In all of the houses in my neighborhood, the living room and dining room form an "L" shape, and there is a small nook, usually with original built-ins, between the dining room and the kitchen.
When I bought this house, the nook contained a white formica-top table, custom-built by the previous owner's father. Four sturdy white ladder-back chairs surrounded it, and at that table, my son ate most of his meals until 1997, when a small bequest from his uncle Stephen allowed us to get our first computer. Thereafter, meals were taken in the dining room, and the nook became Corinne's grotto.
You could not call this a room, although we often refer to it as my "office", in the Les Nessman sense of a private space that no one can invade without permission. I keep my angel collection on a shelf on the west wall, and to the east is a two-tiered wooden cabinet containing some Limoges and Haviland pieces that I inherited from my mother, including the seven-inch salad plate that my brother Mark and I purchased for eight dollars and gave her for Mother's Day forty years ago. My writing desk and an oak printer stand are crammed against the northwall, where the window opens onto the neighbor's rose trellis.
On the wall to the left of the window in front of me is a picture of my son at age 8, beneath which is a picture of a radiant Uncle Steve taken years ago, when we were all too young to know what the future held. To the right of the window is a small plaque that Patrick made, which reads, "Many hands make light work,". Beneath this wise observation is a picture of my son at age 6, framed with a poem written in his hand, constructed from his the letters of his name, which reads, "Patient, Adventurous, Talented, Remarkable, Intelligent, Casual, Kind".
Patrick.
You knew I'd get there, didn't you -- how could I not?
But let me tell you something else first. Let me tell you about a cartoon called "Ed, Edd and Eddie", which is the story of three boys who are constant companions in one wild adventure after another. My son and I used to watch this cartoon together. In one episode, Ed is going to move out of the neighborhood and Edd laments the impending departure, wailing: "Who will push me on the swings? Who will butter my toast?" We found this line amusing, mimicking it whenever one of us left for the store, or work, or to go to the movies. Who will butter my toast, we had only to say, and peals of giggles or laughter would follow.
Patrick left for college this weekend. Penny Thieme and I drove him to Greencastle, Indiana. It is only fitting that Penny should be the one who accompanied us, since his summer and winter breaks during elementary school were spent with Aunt Penny and Uncle Ben. The two of them are golden threads shot through the tapestry of his life, and hers weaves long and strong through the patterns emerging from each motion of the shuttle. All of his aunts, by birth and by choice, have had special places in Patrick's formation, but Aunt Penny in particular imparted many lessons to Patrick that mothers just cannot convey. They share art, and they share memories of late-night movies, and they have an ease of being that I quite frankly envy. And she is calm and accepting, a perfect foil for my fussy personality. I knew I would need her strength on this trip.
The mound of stuff that we jammed into the Saturn astounded me. A refrigerator, a microwave, a cofee pot, a suitcase, three jam-packed duffle bags, an amp, two guitars, the pedal for the electric guitar, $150.00 worth of food from Costco, a butterfly chair, bedding, towels, a lamp, a waste-basket, and every drug store item that Katrina or I imagined he might need. I cleverly packed all the little things inside of containers that could serve duo purposes in a dorm room, and with Patrick and Penny, I leveraged each item into a nook, cranny or airpocket.
Only a few things got left behind, most of which were replaced in Greencastle. The electric guitar stand, I discovered on the hearth on my return last evening, and it will get shipped, along with his Dali posters, in the first care package.
The trip from Kansas City to St. Louis was uneventful. We found the Iron Barley without incident, and enjoyed an hour or so with my sister Joyce and her daughter Lisa. By seven Friday evening, we had arrived at the Holiday Inn in Cloverdale, where the three of us, hyped to the gills with road buzz, ate bananas, reminisced about Patrick's childhood, and talked of college until much later than we should have.
The system for off-loading freshman belongings is pretty remarkable at DePauw University. The parent is instructed to pull up as close to the student's dorm as possible, and to then deposit all of the student's possessions onto the sidewalk. The student -- or an auxiliary family member -- stations himself by the pile while you park the car, and then you commence sequential trips with armloads of boxes, bundles and baggage to and from your allocated square of cement. In that way, everything you've gathered to make the next nine months as comfortable as the first nine, gets transferred from sidewalk to room with an efficiency that amazed me.
In case you haven't seen a dorm room at DePauw University -- or anywhere else -- a single is 7 feet, 5 inches by 11 feet, 4 inches. It is a cement-block cube which contains a super-long twin bed, a plain desk with obligatory hutch, a bookshelf and a dresser, all made of solid, very heavy wood. As arranged by the housing staff, the dresser flanks one wall, across from which are the desk with its chair and two-shelf hutch, next to the dresser topped by the bookshelf. There are 18 inches of floor space between the two ordered rows of furniture spanning the length of the room.
While Patrick and I engaged in some parent-and-entering-freshman task, Penny decided that a different arrangement would be more commodious, as a consequence of which, the desk, bed and dresser formed a "C" and allowed for three square feet of moving room. With that framework, we were able to unpack everything, including shoving the bookshelf into the closet to serve as shelves for all that food, while stacking the fridge and microwave on the dresser. A corner was co-opted for the folding canvas chair; and the six inches between the bed and the dresser held the amp.
With everything unpacked, hung up, stashed and stored, we left the room to go to the convocation. As he locked the door of his room for the first time, I remarked to Patrick, "It's like you have your own apartment." Came the rapid reply: "Yes, a really really tiny one." As I laughed, he asked, "Do you know how many square feet the room is?" I had to confess that yes, I did -- about 77-1/2. "Yeah," he sighed. "But at least my amp fit."
We all have our priorities. I had felt the same way about the Costco goods -- my boy can surely survive the first month, I kept telling myself. Club crackers and peanut butter.
The students separated from their parents for the convocation. Penny and I drifted casually down to the performing arts center. A large volunteer, the first nominally unfriendly one I saw, tried to prevent me from entering the auditorium. "You can go to the balcony," she said. I looked at the two steep flights of open metal stairs. Impossible. She then gestured to a side room. "Then go over to Moore Annex, and you can view it on video."
Video? Watch the convocation on video? They had to be joking.
Of course, I did not yet know what a "convocation" was. Had I been quick, I might have explored the Internet to learn the meaning of this word. However, I knew from the weekend activity guide that the school president would be speaking, so I assumed it was an important event. This, I would not watch on video.
I am not ashamed to say that I played the ADA card, and got a seat on the main floor.
There we were ushered, Aunt Penny and I, into the midst of parents who had arrived early enough to get a seat in the best section without being pushy. Luckily, several chairs were still empty in the middle of the second row beyond the bank of seats reserved for the students, and into these the chastened volunteer led us. As we waited, the lights dimmed, and a huge screen dropped from the ceiling. A video began to play, depicting various members of the academic community talking about DePauw in reverent tones, or with animated voices, or with quiet confidence. I found their enthusiasm intriguing, and began to suspect that Patrick had chosen a very good place indeed.
And then the screen went blank. A hush descended over the assembly.
Seconds later, live feed commenced. I didn't understand what I was seeing, at first. But the parents around me began murmuring, and the sound of applause swelled. I squinted, furrowed my brow, peered intently at the images before me and suddenly, I realized what was happening -- and my friends, I began to cry.
The entire faculty of DePauw University had formed two lines in the long hallway outside of the auditorium in which I sat. The doors to the Center stood opened. Through those doors, one by one, in slow single file, came the Class of 2013, and as they processed into the building, they were given a standing ovation by their professors.
As the eight-hundred members of my son's class entered the auditorium, the waiting families began to clap as well. The acclamation resonated through the high-ceilinged room; the thunderous praise rang from the seats of parents, grandparents, guardians, siblings, uncles and aunts in the lower rows, rising to meet the roar from the balcony. My hands ached from clapping and still the students came, and still the faculty applauded, and still I cried, until each freshman had entered. Then the faculty entered and the students returned the ovation as the stage filled with professors, and deans, and assistants, and even the student body president. The applause continued until each and every one of them reached their designated place, and then, in one grand moment, everyone sat -- and the hall was silent.
Speeches followed, some of which were tender and poignant. Poetry was read; advice dispensed; greetings spoken. In due course, we exited the hall and our children continued with freshman activities while we shoved soggy handkerchiefs into our pockets and marveled among ourselves that DePauw surely knows how to do things right.
At the appointed hour, we returned to the smallest apartment on the planet, for the hour designated on the written agenda to Say Goodbye to Families. The last few items had been purchased at CVS in a mad dash, and promises had been extracted -- take your medicine, wear your glasses, listen to your mentor, study hard, take good care of yourself. I walked out of his dorm room, followed by his beloved Penny.
I would not have heard him if the suite had not been empty, but it was. And so, I did hear him when he said, in the very quietest of little-boy-whispers, from inside his allocated seventy-seven square feet,
"Who will push me on the swings. . . who will butter my toast?"
We laughed, then, my nearly-six-feet tall son and I; and he let me hug him, and we all went down to the car. A few last things were shoved into his hands -- more cash; the paper from the freshmen service project; a copy of the housing contract. We scrambled to find his glasses; Penny teased him about girls; and, too quickly, with a casual flick of his hand, he turned, and walked back into Hogate Hall. I was left standing on the sidewalk where once his pile of stuff had been, wondering what on earth I was thinking, leaving my only child in a strange place eight hours from home, with nothing more to protect him than his inherited charm and unlimited Verizon Wireless texting.
In my heart of hearts, I know my fears are unfounded. He will suffer no more indignities than any young man starting college; and he will have as many glorious moments of stunning self-discovery. He will come home taller, more self-confident, and with a new hair cut that some cute freshman girl decides to make him to get. There will eventually come a holiday that he does not spend with me; and then he will do a winter term abroad; and, eventually, I will turn his bedroom into a sewing room, or a library, or a storage space for broken suitcases.
The weaver chooses her patterns, and the threads from which her work will be constructed. Not so the parent. We are more akin to the sculptor -- or perhaps the puppeteer. Like Giuseppe, I wanted a real boy, and that is precisely what I got. He has come to life now -- and I would not stop his dancing if I could.
Mugwumpishly tendered, written on my iBook G4, in my empty nest, in Brookside, Kansas City, Missouri, on this 24th day of August, in the year 2009.
Corinne Corley
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Saturday Musings, 23 June 2012
Good morning,
As I write, the sounds of joyful creatures fill the air. I hear crickets, I think, or perhaps cicadas, although I think of katydids as more talkative in the evening. But something chirps, rhythmically and loud; and the birds sweep from branch to branch in a style that I find comforting in the face of the nastiness on the front page of my morning paper.
At dinner last evening, with friends, we played the "Leisman Lunch Game", courtesy of our friend Matthew Leisman, with whom we dined along with his lovely lady Sara Madson and a friend of theirs. The game consisted of identifying people, alive, not relatives, not friends, with whom you would have lunch on the five weekdays. We went round the table, identifying increasingly interesting choices. Then we played another game: What was the worst job you ever had? What was the best? I close my eyes now, and think back, to the days when I had a job -- before I discovered the monumental freedom and calamitous curse of self-employment, when I still had to toe lines and meet the stifling expectations of others.
My worst job. . . It's hard to choose between being the maid in a convent and an otherwise pleasant job as a unit secretary in a psychiatric hospital which included the duty of observing electro-shock therapy sessions, a grim task that seared itself on some otherwise harmless corner of my brain, never to be forgotten.
My best job. . . leaving aside the banal, knee-jerk response of motherhood, unquestionably the most rewarding position that I've held is saving family farms from foreclosure. The thrill of setting foot down upon land that would have gone into bank inventory but for my deft and sometimes disingenuous legal maneuvering cannot be gainsaid. I've had the privilege of casting my gaze in a wide circle over the tops of gentle mountains, from the vantage point of acreage nestled on the peak of one of them where a small herd of cattle would continue to graze, for another cycle of interest payments at the very least.
I've hustled from a Louisiana courtroom, four months before my son's due date, labor pains having started hours before, my pilot and co-counsel each reaching for burdensome trial bag and pocketbook, hearing the outraged mutters of a Federal Land Bank officer telling his attorney: I can't believe we got beat by a pregnant crippled girl from Arkansas.
A fancy lawyer from St. Louis once moved to have me barred from humming in the presence of the jury in a civil suit in Dade County, Missouri, in defense of a farmer who had invented a unique apparatus for cultivating but lost the patent rights and subsequently stood to lose his land. The judge tilted his head, and asked me if I had been humming, and what the song had been. On hearing that I had actually been humming "A Mighty Fortress is Our God", the judge overruled the motion. We got that jury verdict, and settled in the hallway to save the homestead and avoid a likely reversal on appeal.
I argued jury instructions until midnight in Brookfield, a country code-phrase for striving to avoid the evisceration of our case through directed verdict. I heard the judge chide my boss for his seeming indifference to the process, and smothered an ill-timed smile at my employer's response: I already know what I'm going to say to the jury, Your Honor, so it doesn't much matter to me what you say to them. Left with a sole count of breach of contract, we nevertheless got to the jury and again, negotiated in the conference room across from their sequestered deliberations to save our client's homestead and a small parcel of surrounding land. We got the jury verdict once again, but it had no meaning other than to wet our appetites for the next case.
Through the 1980s we cut a swathe across the country, negotiating debt restructuring, attacking the feeble credibility of bank officers who handed out loads of cash and then pulled the plug when drought hit, and finding ways to let land go without sacrificing homes. We were reviled by fiscal conservatives who blamed the farmers for mishandling their businesses and castigated by government employees who felt they had no part in the pending demise of the American family farmer. We crafted causes of action that seemed dubious to many, and might have been. But in the process, we found a few smoking guns, including, most famously, a Farm Credit in-house private memorandum of which I still, somewhere, have a copy, in which it was said that no client of ours should ever be offered a deal, lest our efforts be validated and encouraged.
Looking back on that day, from the advantage of twenty more years of law practice, two decades of talking to others, reading the newspaper, and listening to the occasional pundit from both sides of the political spectrum, I understand both the pluses and minuses of what we did back then. Our work at times gave a second chance to a competent farmer, but some times merely prolonged inevitable failure. While we did find evidence of what could be called predatory lending practices, at times dramatically revealed in full-size exhibits in front of judge and jury, more often we found sad, unfortunate turns of events that no one could have foreseen -- the devastating droughts of the mid-1980s, the growth of commercial agri-business, the evolution of society away from rural life with new generations decamping and leaving aging fathers, mothers, and grandparents with no one to take up the plough from their tired hands.
The faces of those days still loom large in my memory. Careworn, worried and gray, most of the men and women who hired us bore themselves with dignity tinged with resignation. I followed my boss into the well-scrubbed kitchens of farm wives across America. I pretended to eat their land-raised beef, pulled hip-boots over my Mary Janes and toured pig sties, and hoisted myself, with assistance from a rough-skinned but gentle hand, to the backs of tractors. I shook the dust of their fields from my suit before taking my place at the counsel table in courtrooms throughout the Midwest and the South, with folders on my table and a full retinue of somberly clad bank lawyers opposite me. Most of the time, I could find a soft spot in the heart of someone, and it was often the bank officer, who in many instances attended the same church as my clients, whose children sat in the same small school house as my clients' children, and whose father and mother were buried in the same cemetery as my clients' people.
In one courtroom, a bank officer turned to his lawyer and said, Enough. Enough. I can't do this. You go sit outside, and let me talk to Miss Corley. I think me and her can figure this thing out without your fancy double-talk. Just step outside there, Bob, and let us work. And work we did. He wrote the debt down to the value of the land, culled out the family home and ten acres, and forgave my client anything above the value of the remaining property. My client lost his farm but kept his home. He took the deal. It's been a long time since that happened, and I do not know if he regretted following my advice. But the banker and I knew that what we did was right, and so, I hope, did God.
I held that job from 1989 to 1992, when I left the sinking ship that was the law firm where I had these magnificent experiences. It fell from grace to grief six months after I quit, toppled by some bizarre fee practices that cost my boss his law license in the end. I understood the folly and the fury of the place. The lawyers who started the firm had all gone to law school after suffering foreclosures, and their goal was to prevent others from experiencing the same sad fate. The goal's virtue got lost in the utilization of indefensible means to serve laudable ends, a course of action in which I was not asked to engage and of which I was unaware until after the fact.
On account of my job with that firm, I learned some of the best lawyering tactics that I've ever known. I also learned some of the worst. I got involved in wildly impractical efforts that sometimes shocked even us by succeeding, and I met characters, including Gerry Spence and Willie Nelson, of whom my opinions radically changed because of standing in their shadows. I sat in some of the smallest air craft imaginable, and landed in some of the worst airports on earth. I once gripped the right arm of a pilot as I huddled in a pair of coveralls, pregnant, skinny and scared, as he set the Cessna 150 down in an icy cornfield, bringing it to a shuddering stop beside my client's pick-up truck, on a clear, dark January night in northern Missouri.
Several of the people with whom I worked at that firm have since died. The rest are scattered, in private practice or social service jobs. Occasionally, I hear about one of them, and I've connected with a couple on Facebook. I rarely reflect on that time, except to remember the birth of my son, and our journey home. But when asked, despite the fact that my last few paychecks never cleared, and even though, a year after leaving, I sweated through an hour-long interview with an FBI agent, I can honestly say that saving American family farms from foreclosure was the best job I ever had.
Except, of course, for being a mom.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
As I write, the sounds of joyful creatures fill the air. I hear crickets, I think, or perhaps cicadas, although I think of katydids as more talkative in the evening. But something chirps, rhythmically and loud; and the birds sweep from branch to branch in a style that I find comforting in the face of the nastiness on the front page of my morning paper.
At dinner last evening, with friends, we played the "Leisman Lunch Game", courtesy of our friend Matthew Leisman, with whom we dined along with his lovely lady Sara Madson and a friend of theirs. The game consisted of identifying people, alive, not relatives, not friends, with whom you would have lunch on the five weekdays. We went round the table, identifying increasingly interesting choices. Then we played another game: What was the worst job you ever had? What was the best? I close my eyes now, and think back, to the days when I had a job -- before I discovered the monumental freedom and calamitous curse of self-employment, when I still had to toe lines and meet the stifling expectations of others.
My worst job. . . It's hard to choose between being the maid in a convent and an otherwise pleasant job as a unit secretary in a psychiatric hospital which included the duty of observing electro-shock therapy sessions, a grim task that seared itself on some otherwise harmless corner of my brain, never to be forgotten.
My best job. . . leaving aside the banal, knee-jerk response of motherhood, unquestionably the most rewarding position that I've held is saving family farms from foreclosure. The thrill of setting foot down upon land that would have gone into bank inventory but for my deft and sometimes disingenuous legal maneuvering cannot be gainsaid. I've had the privilege of casting my gaze in a wide circle over the tops of gentle mountains, from the vantage point of acreage nestled on the peak of one of them where a small herd of cattle would continue to graze, for another cycle of interest payments at the very least.
I've hustled from a Louisiana courtroom, four months before my son's due date, labor pains having started hours before, my pilot and co-counsel each reaching for burdensome trial bag and pocketbook, hearing the outraged mutters of a Federal Land Bank officer telling his attorney: I can't believe we got beat by a pregnant crippled girl from Arkansas.
A fancy lawyer from St. Louis once moved to have me barred from humming in the presence of the jury in a civil suit in Dade County, Missouri, in defense of a farmer who had invented a unique apparatus for cultivating but lost the patent rights and subsequently stood to lose his land. The judge tilted his head, and asked me if I had been humming, and what the song had been. On hearing that I had actually been humming "A Mighty Fortress is Our God", the judge overruled the motion. We got that jury verdict, and settled in the hallway to save the homestead and avoid a likely reversal on appeal.
I argued jury instructions until midnight in Brookfield, a country code-phrase for striving to avoid the evisceration of our case through directed verdict. I heard the judge chide my boss for his seeming indifference to the process, and smothered an ill-timed smile at my employer's response: I already know what I'm going to say to the jury, Your Honor, so it doesn't much matter to me what you say to them. Left with a sole count of breach of contract, we nevertheless got to the jury and again, negotiated in the conference room across from their sequestered deliberations to save our client's homestead and a small parcel of surrounding land. We got the jury verdict once again, but it had no meaning other than to wet our appetites for the next case.
Through the 1980s we cut a swathe across the country, negotiating debt restructuring, attacking the feeble credibility of bank officers who handed out loads of cash and then pulled the plug when drought hit, and finding ways to let land go without sacrificing homes. We were reviled by fiscal conservatives who blamed the farmers for mishandling their businesses and castigated by government employees who felt they had no part in the pending demise of the American family farmer. We crafted causes of action that seemed dubious to many, and might have been. But in the process, we found a few smoking guns, including, most famously, a Farm Credit in-house private memorandum of which I still, somewhere, have a copy, in which it was said that no client of ours should ever be offered a deal, lest our efforts be validated and encouraged.
Looking back on that day, from the advantage of twenty more years of law practice, two decades of talking to others, reading the newspaper, and listening to the occasional pundit from both sides of the political spectrum, I understand both the pluses and minuses of what we did back then. Our work at times gave a second chance to a competent farmer, but some times merely prolonged inevitable failure. While we did find evidence of what could be called predatory lending practices, at times dramatically revealed in full-size exhibits in front of judge and jury, more often we found sad, unfortunate turns of events that no one could have foreseen -- the devastating droughts of the mid-1980s, the growth of commercial agri-business, the evolution of society away from rural life with new generations decamping and leaving aging fathers, mothers, and grandparents with no one to take up the plough from their tired hands.
The faces of those days still loom large in my memory. Careworn, worried and gray, most of the men and women who hired us bore themselves with dignity tinged with resignation. I followed my boss into the well-scrubbed kitchens of farm wives across America. I pretended to eat their land-raised beef, pulled hip-boots over my Mary Janes and toured pig sties, and hoisted myself, with assistance from a rough-skinned but gentle hand, to the backs of tractors. I shook the dust of their fields from my suit before taking my place at the counsel table in courtrooms throughout the Midwest and the South, with folders on my table and a full retinue of somberly clad bank lawyers opposite me. Most of the time, I could find a soft spot in the heart of someone, and it was often the bank officer, who in many instances attended the same church as my clients, whose children sat in the same small school house as my clients' children, and whose father and mother were buried in the same cemetery as my clients' people.
In one courtroom, a bank officer turned to his lawyer and said, Enough. Enough. I can't do this. You go sit outside, and let me talk to Miss Corley. I think me and her can figure this thing out without your fancy double-talk. Just step outside there, Bob, and let us work. And work we did. He wrote the debt down to the value of the land, culled out the family home and ten acres, and forgave my client anything above the value of the remaining property. My client lost his farm but kept his home. He took the deal. It's been a long time since that happened, and I do not know if he regretted following my advice. But the banker and I knew that what we did was right, and so, I hope, did God.
I held that job from 1989 to 1992, when I left the sinking ship that was the law firm where I had these magnificent experiences. It fell from grace to grief six months after I quit, toppled by some bizarre fee practices that cost my boss his law license in the end. I understood the folly and the fury of the place. The lawyers who started the firm had all gone to law school after suffering foreclosures, and their goal was to prevent others from experiencing the same sad fate. The goal's virtue got lost in the utilization of indefensible means to serve laudable ends, a course of action in which I was not asked to engage and of which I was unaware until after the fact.
On account of my job with that firm, I learned some of the best lawyering tactics that I've ever known. I also learned some of the worst. I got involved in wildly impractical efforts that sometimes shocked even us by succeeding, and I met characters, including Gerry Spence and Willie Nelson, of whom my opinions radically changed because of standing in their shadows. I sat in some of the smallest air craft imaginable, and landed in some of the worst airports on earth. I once gripped the right arm of a pilot as I huddled in a pair of coveralls, pregnant, skinny and scared, as he set the Cessna 150 down in an icy cornfield, bringing it to a shuddering stop beside my client's pick-up truck, on a clear, dark January night in northern Missouri.
Several of the people with whom I worked at that firm have since died. The rest are scattered, in private practice or social service jobs. Occasionally, I hear about one of them, and I've connected with a couple on Facebook. I rarely reflect on that time, except to remember the birth of my son, and our journey home. But when asked, despite the fact that my last few paychecks never cleared, and even though, a year after leaving, I sweated through an hour-long interview with an FBI agent, I can honestly say that saving American family farms from foreclosure was the best job I ever had.
Except, of course, for being a mom.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
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The Missouri Mugwump®
- M. Corinne Corley
- I've been many things in my life: A child, a daughter, a friend; a wife, a mother, a lawyer and a pet-owner. I've given my best to many things and my worst to a few. I live in Brookside, in an airplane bungalow. I'm an eternal optimist and a sometime-poet. If I ever got a poem published in The New Yorker, I would die a happy woman. I'm a proud supporter of the Arts in the California Delta. I vote Democrat, fly a Peace flag, live in a tiny house on wheels, cry at Hallmark commercials, and recycle. I am The Missouri Mugwump. ®