Mid Week At Work: Endings.

I posted this the other day:

Sigh . . .

And depicted with a horse too. . . 

Kroger retires after 35 years of service  CODY - Worland Wildlife Biologist Bart Kroger retired last month, bringing his 35-year career with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to a close.  “Bart has been referred to as the ‘core of the agency’, meaning through his dedication and continuous hard work, he has significantly and meaningfully impacted wildlife management within his district and throughout the state,” said Corey Class, Cody region wildlife management coordinator. “Throughout his career, he has been a solid, steady and dependable wildlife biologist, providing a foundation for wildlife conservation and management in the Bighorn Basin.” Through his quiet and thoughtful approach, Bart has gained the respect of both his peers and the public. Bart is best known for his commitment to spending time in the field gaining first-hand knowledge of the wildlife and the habitat that supports them, as well as the people he serves in his district.

 Found this old draft the other day

RETIREMENT ELIGIBILITY

Vesting Requirements

After obtaining 72 months of service, you are eligible to elect a monthly benefit at

retirement age. The 72 months of service do not have to be consecutive months.

Retirement Eligibility

You are eligible for retirement when you reach age 50 and are vested. There is no

early retirement under this plan. You must begin drawing your benefit no later than

age 65.

Which means, as a practical matter, if you are to draw retirement as a Wyoming Game Warden, you need to take the job no later than the beginning of your 59th year.

Of course, if you started at age 59, you wouldn't be drawing much, if anything.

That doesn't mean, of course, that you couldn't be hired after age 59.  You'd just draw no retirement.

The actual statute on this matter states the following, as we noted in a prior thread, from 2023, quoted below:

2. Wyoming Game Wardens were once required to retire at age 55, but a lawsuit some decades ago overturned that. It, in turn, was later overruled, but by that time the state had changed the system. Since that time, it's set it again statutorily, with the age now being 65 by law.  There aren't, therefore, any 67-year-old game wardens.

Statutorily, the current law provides:

9-3-607. Age of retirement.

(a) Any employee with six (6) or more years of service to his credit is eligible to receive a retirement allowance under this article when he attains age fifty (50).

(b) Effective July 1, 1998, any employee retiring after July 1, 1998, with twenty-five (25) or more years of service may elect to retire and receive a benefit upon attaining age fifty (50) as described in W.S. 9-3-610.

(c) Repealed by Laws 1993, ch. 120, §§ 1, 2.

(d) Any employee in service who has attained age sixty-five (65), shall be retired not later than the last day of the calendar month in which his 65th birthday occurs. 

Age limitations of this type are tied to physical fitness.  But what about mental fitness?  As mentioned here before, Gen. Marshall forcibly retired most serving U.S. Army generals, or at least sidelined them, who were over 50 years of age during World War Two, and that had to do with their thinking.  We now allow judges to remain on the bench until they are 70.  Would 60 make more sense?  And can the same argument be made for lawyers, who are officers of the court?

This differs, I'd note, significantly from the Federal Government.  The cutoff there is age 37.  That's it.

Have a wildlife management degree?  Spend the last few years in some other state agency?  Win the Congressional Medal of Honor for single handled defeating the Boko Haram?  38 years old now? Well, too bloody bad for you.

Anyhow, I guess this says something about the American concept that age is just a number and the hands of the clock don't really move.

They do.

On a somewhat contrary note, I was in something this week when a 70-year-old man indicated he might retire in order to take a job as a commercial airline pilot.

He's never been employed in that capacity, but he's had the license for 50 years.  It wouldn't be carrying people for United or something, but in some other commercial capacity.  

He's always wanted to do it, and has an offer.

Well, more power to him.

I did a lot of what this lawyer is doing here, when first practicing, in front of barrister cases just like this.  No young lawyer does that now.

I spoke to a lawyer I've known the entire time I've been practicing law, almost. He's four years younger than me, which would make him 56 or so.  He's worked his entire career in general civil, in a small and often distressed town, in a firm founded by his parents.  When I was first practicing, it was pretty vibrant.

Now he's the only one left.

He's retiring this spring.  This was motivated by his single employee's decision to retire.

I was really surprised, in part due to his age.  I'm glad that he can retire, but it was a bit depressing.  We're witnessing, in Wyoming, the death of the small town civil firm.  Everything is gravitating to the larger cities, and frankly in the larger cities, they're in competition with the big cities in Colorado and Utah.  That's insured a bill in the legislature to try to recruit lawyers to rural areas.*

It's not going to work.

The problem has been, for some time, that it's impossible to recruit young lawyers to small rural areas.  The economics don't allow for it.  The economics don't allow for it, in part, as the Wyoming Supreme Court forced the Uniform Bar Exam down on the Board of Law Examiners, and that resulted in opening the doors to Denver and Salt Lake lawyers.  It's been something the small firms have been competing against ever since.

And not only that, but some sort of demographic change has operated to just keep younger lawyers out of smaller places, and frankly to cause them to opt for easier paths than civil law in general.  I know older lawyers that came from the larger cities in the state, and set up small town practices when they were young, as that's where the jobs were and having a job was what they needed to have.  I've even known lawyers who went to UW who moved here from somewhere else who took that path, relocating from big Eastern or Midwestern cities to do so.

No longer.  Younger lawyers don't do that.

Quite a few don't stick with civil practice at all.  They leave for government work, where the work hours are regular, and the paycheck isn't dependent on billable hours.   And recently, though we are not supposed to note it, young women attorneys reflect a new outlook in which a lot of them bail out of practice or greatly reduce their work hours after just a few years in, a desire to have a more regular domestic life being part of that.

I guess people can't be blamed for that, but we can, as a state, be blamed for being shortsighted.  Adopting the UBE was shortsighted.  Sticking with it has been inexcusable.  I'm not the only one who has said so, and frankly not the only one who probably paid a price for doing so.  The reaction to voices crying in the wilderness is often to close the windows so you don't have to hear them.  Rumor had it, which I've never seen verified and have heard expressly denied by a person within the law school administration, that it was done in order to aid the law school, under the theory that it would make UW law degrees transportable, which had pretty much the practical effect on the local law as Commodore Matthew Perry opening up trade with Japan.

Wyoming Board of Law Examiners bringing in the UBE.

The lawyer in this case is worried, as he has no hobbies and doesn't know what he'll do with himself.  I'm surprised how often this concern is expressed.  To only have the law, or any work, is sad.  But a court reporter, about my age, expressed the same concern to me the other day.

Court reporting has really taken a beating in this state, more so than lawyers.  When I was first practicing, every community had court reporters.  Now there are hardly any left at all.  Huge firms are down to just a handful of people, and people just aren't coming into the occupation.  It's a real concern to lawyers.

It's always looked like an interesting job to me, having all the diversity of being a lawyer, with seemingly a lot less stress.  But having never done it, perhaps I'm wildly in error.  We really don't know what other people's jobs are like unless we've done them.

A lawyer I know just died by his own hand.

I met him when he took over for a very long time Wyoming trial attorney upon that attorney's death.

The attorney he took over for had died when he went in his backyard and put a rifle bullet through his brain.  He was a well known attorney, and we could tell something wasn't quite right with him.  Just the day prior, he called me and asked for an extension on something.  I'd already given two.  I paused, and then, against my better judgment, said, "well. . . okay".  

I'd known him too long to say no.

He was clearing his schedule.  If I had said no, I feel, he wouldn't have done it, and he'd be alive today.

The new attorney came in and was sort of like a goofy force of nature.  Hard to describe.  A huge man, probably in his 40s at the time, but very childlike.  He talked and talked. Depositions would be extended due to long meandering conversational interjections, as I learned in that case and then a very serious subsequent one.

He was hugely proud of having been a member of a legendary local plaintiff's firm.  That didn't really matter much to me then, and it still doesn't.  My family has always had an odd reaction to the supposedly honorific.  My father never bothered to collect his National Defense Service Medal for serving during the Korean War, I didn't bother to get my Reserve Overseas Training Ribbon, or my South Korean award for Operation Team Spirit, I don't have my law school diploma's anymore. . . It's not that they aren't honors, it's just, well, oh well.  We tend to value other things, which in some ways sets standards that are highers than others, and very difficult to personally meet.

Anyhow, the guy was very friendly and told me details of his life, not all of which were true.  He was raised by his grandmother, his grandmother had somehow encouraged him to go to law school,  Both true.

He was from Utah and grown up there, but consistently denied being a Mormon.  His wife was Mormon, he said.  He was an Episcopalian.  As I'm very reserved, I'm not really going to talk religion with somebody I only casually and professionally know, as opposed to one of my very extroverted and devout partners who will bring it up at the drop of a hat, and his religious confession didn't particularly matter to me, given the light nature of our relationship.  As it turns out, and as I suspected, that wasn't even remotely true.  He was and always had been a Mormon.  Why did he lie about that?  No idea.

I suppose this is some sort of warning here, maybe.

The first lawyer noted in this part of this entry had suffered something hugely traumatic early in his life and never really got over it. Some people roll with the punches on traumas and some do not.  We hear about combat veterans all the time who live with the horrors they experienced, and which break them down, all the time, but I've known a couple who didn't have that sort of reaction at all, and who could coolly relate their combat experiences.  Others can't get over something that happened to them, ever.

With the second lawyers, there were some oddities, one being that he jumped from firm to firm, and to solo, and back and forth, all the time. That's unusual.  Another was that he seemed to have pinned his whole identify on being a lawyer.  It's one thing, like the retiring fellow above, to have worked it your whole life and have nothing else to do, it's quite another to have that make up everything you are.  He'd drunk deeply of the plaintiff's lawyer propaganda about helping the little guy and all that crap, and didn't really realize that litigators often hurt people as often as they help them, or do both at the same time.  Maybe the veil had come off.  Maybe he should never have been a lawyer in the first place.  Maybe it was organic and had nothing to do with any of this.

Well, the moral of this story, or morals, if there are any, would be this.  You don't have endless time to do anything, 70-year-old commercial airline pilots aside. You probably don't know what it's like to do something unless you've actually done it, but you can investigate it and learn as much as possible.  The UBE, which the Wyoming Supreme Court was complicit in adopting, is killing the small  town civil lawyer and only abrogating it, or its successor, and restoring the prior system can address that.   The entire whaling for justice plaintiff's lawyer ethos is pretty much crap.  And, finally, you had some sort of identify before you took up your occupation.  Unless that identity was what you became, before you became it, don't let the occupation become it.  It may be shallower than you think.

Footnotes:

The bill:

SENATE FILE NO. SF0033

Wyoming rural attorney recruitment program.

Sponsored by: Joint Judiciary Interim Committee

A BILL

for

AN ACT relating to attorneys-at-law; establishing the rural attorney recruitment pilot program; specifying eligibility requirements for counties and attorneys to participate in the program; specifying administration, oversight and payment obligations for the program; requiring reports; providing a sunset date for the program; authorizing the adoption of rules, policies and procedures; providing an appropriation; and providing for an effective date.

Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:

Section 1.  W.S. 33‑5‑201 through 33‑5‑203 are created to read:

ARTICLE 2

RURAL ATTORNEY RECRUITMENT PROGRAM

33‑5‑201.  Rural attorney recruitment program established; findings; program requirements; county qualifications; annual reports.

(a)  In light of the shortage of attorneys practicing law in rural Wyoming counties, the legislature finds that the establishment of a rural attorney recruitment program constitutes a valid public purpose, of primary benefit to the citizens of the state of Wyoming.

(b)  The Wyoming state bar may establish a rural attorney recruitment program to assist rural Wyoming counties in recruiting attorneys to practice law in those counties.

(c)  Each county eligible under this subsection may apply to the Wyoming state bar to participate in the program. A county is eligible to participate in the program if the county:

(i)  Has a population of not greater than twenty‑five thousand (25,000);

(ii)  Has an average of not greater than one and one‑half (1.5) qualified attorneys in the county for every one thousand (1,000) residents. As used in this paragraph, "qualified attorney" means an attorney who provides legal services to private citizens on a fee basis for an average of not less than twenty (20) hours per week. "Qualified attorney" shall not include an attorney who is a full‑time judge, prosecutor, public defender, judicial clerk, in‑house counsel, trust officer and any licensed attorney who is in retired status or who is not engaged in the practice of law;

(iii)  Agrees to provide the county share of the incentive payment required under this article;

(iv)  Is determined to be eligible to participate in the program by the Wyoming state bar.

(d)  Before determining a county's eligibility, the Wyoming state bar shall conduct an assessment to evaluate the county's need for an attorney and the county's ability to sustain and support an attorney. The Wyoming state bar shall maintain a list of counties that have been assessed and are eligible to participate in the program under this article. The Wyoming state bar may revise any county assessment or conduct a new assessment as the Wyoming State bar deems necessary to reflect any change in a county's eligibility.

(e)  In selecting eligible counties to participate in the program, the Wyoming state bar shall consider:

(i)  The county's demographics;

(ii)  The number of attorneys in the county and the number of attorneys projected to be practicing in the county over the next five (5) years;

(iii)  Any recommendations from the district judges and circuit judges of the county;

(iv)  The county's economic development programs;

(v)  The county's geographical location relative to other counties participating in the program;

(vi)  An evaluation of any attorney or applicant for admission to the state bar seeking to practice in the county as a program participant, including the attorney's or applicant's previous or existing ties to the county;

(vii)  Any prior participation of the county in the program;

(viii)  Any other factor that the Wyoming state bar deems necessary.

(f)  A participating eligible county may enter into agreements to assist the county in meeting the county's obligations for participating in the program.

(g)  Not later than October 1, 2024 and each October 1 thereafter that the program is in effect, the Wyoming state bar shall submit an annual report to the joint judiciary interim committee on the activities of the program. Each report shall include information on the number of attorneys and counties participating in the program, the amount of incentive payments made to attorneys under the program, the general status of the program and any recommendations for continuing, modifying or ending the program.

33‑5‑202.  Rural attorney recruitment program; attorney requirements; incentive payments; termination of program.

(a)  Except as otherwise provided in this subsection, any attorney licensed to practice law in Wyoming or an applicant for admission to the Wyoming state bar may apply to the Wyoming state bar to participate in the rural attorney recruitment program established under this article. No attorney or applicant shall participate in the program if the attorney or applicant has previously participated in the program or has previously participated in any other state or federal scholarship, loan repayment or tuition reimbursement program that obligated the attorney to provide legal services in an underserved area.

(b)  Not more than five (5) attorneys shall participate in the program established under this article at any one (1) time.

(c)  Subject to available funding and as consideration for providing legal services in an eligible county, each attorney approved by the Wyoming state bar to participate in the program shall be entitled to receive an incentive payment in five (5) equal annual installments. Each annual incentive payment shall be paid on or after July 1 of each year. Each annual incentive payment shall be in an amount equal to ninety percent (90%) of the University of Wyoming college of law resident tuition for thirty (30) credit hours and annual fees as of July 1, 2024.

(d)  Subject to available funding, the supreme court shall make each incentive payment to the participating attorney. The Wyoming state bar and each participating county shall remit its share of the incentive payment to the supreme court in a manner and by a date specified by the supreme court. The Wyoming state bar shall certify to the supreme court that a participating attorney has completed all annual program requirements and that the participating attorney is entitled to the incentive payment for the applicable year. The responsibility for incentive payments under this section shall be as follows:

(i)  Fifty percent (50%) of the incentive payments shall be from funds appropriated to the supreme court;

(ii)  Thirty‑five percent (35%) of the incentive payments shall be provided by each county paying for attorneys participating in the program in the county;

(iii)  Fifteen percent (15%) of the incentive payments shall be provided by the Wyoming state bar from nonstate funds.

(e)  Subject to available funding for the program, each attorney participating in the program shall enter into an agreement with the supreme court, the participating county and the Wyoming state bar that obligates the attorney to practice law full‑time in the participating county for not less than five (5) years. As part of the agreement required under this subsection, each participating attorney shall agree to reside in the participating county for the period in which the attorney practices law in the participating county under the program. No agreement shall be effective until it is filed with and approved by the Wyoming state bar.

(f)  Any attorney who receives an incentive payment under this article and subsequently breaches the agreement entered into under subsection (e) of this section shall repay all funds received under this article pursuant to terms and conditions established by the supreme court. Failure to repay funds as required by this subsection shall subject the attorney to license suspension.

(g)  The Wyoming state bar may promulgate any policies or procedures necessary to implement this article.  The supreme court may promulgate any rules necessary to implement this article.

(h)  The program established under this article shall cease on June 30, 2029, provided that attorneys participating in the program as of June 30, 2029 shall complete their obligation and receive payments as authorized by this article.

33‑5‑203.  Sunset.

(a)  W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 are repealed effective July 1, 2029.

(b)  Notwithstanding subsection (a) of this section, attorneys participating in the rural attorney pilot program authorized in W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 shall complete the requirements of the program and shall be entitled to the authorized payments in accordance with W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 as provided on June 30, 2029.

Section 2.  There is appropriated one hundred ninety‑seven thousand three hundred seventy‑five dollars ($197,375.00) from the general fund to the supreme court for the period beginning with the effective date of this act and ending June 30, 2029 to be expended only for purposes of providing incentive payments for the rural attorney recruitment program established under this act. This appropriation shall not be transferred or expended for any other purpose. Notwithstanding W.S. 9‑2‑1008, 9‑2‑1012(e) and 9‑4‑207, this appropriation shall not revert until June 30, 2029.

Section 3.  This act is effective July 1, 2024.

On being an only child.

My father (left as viewed) and his siblings.  I don't know the date, but given their apparent ages, this photograph would have been taken in Scotsbluff, Nebraska, in the late 1930s.  His borther is the only one left alive.  My father was the first to pass, at age 62.

My father was very close to his three siblings, one of whom is still living.  He was particularly close to that sibling, his brother.  They spoke by phone nearly every day when my uncle, who was a fireman, was not working.

My mother's parents and their children.  My mother is seated, fourth from the left as viewed, next to her mother.  Her youngest sister, seated far right, was the first to pass.

My mother was close to most of her siblings.  They were a feisty bunch in general, and they argued amongst themselves, but they were close. Like all such relationships, some were closer than others.  My mother was particularly close to her youngest sibling, one of her four brothers (she had three sisters as well), and he was very close to her.  A very long-lived family as a rule, her sisters have passed, but three of her brothers are living.

I'm an only child.

That was not my parent's desire.  They simply had a very hard time having children, and they were not young when they married, really.  Indeed, in the common understanding of the time, while they'd be regarded as "young" today, but only barely so, at the time of their marriage, at the time, they would have been regarded as middle-aged. Certainly my mother would have been, she being three years older than my father. They were married five years at the time of my birth, and she was 37 years old.  My birth was it, she'd never have another child.  Indeed, in retrospect, while was a remarkably fit person her entire life, my birth took a lot out of her in other ways and a significant psycho-medical decline would set in with in thirteen years of that event.

When you grow up as an only child, you constantly hear how "lucky" you are.  That's the point of the post.  You really aren't.

People like to imagine that only children are "spoiled", but at least in my case that wasn't true. The concept of being spoiled even has a name, Only Child Syndrome, but research has shown it's largely a myth.  My parents probably made a dedicated effort to keep that from happening to me.  What you are, however, is deprived in some very significant ways, all of which have to do with the close bonds that form between siblings being absent.

If you grow up an only child, you miss out on ever having that close relationship that can only come through a blood bond.  Siblings never escape their siblings, even under extreme stress. This is not true of any other relationship whatsoever, although a real, not an American Civil Religion, marriage does that in another fashion.  

And having siblings teaches you things that lacking them does not, and which can never be made up for.

Growing up as a child, my closest friends were my parents.  Having no siblings to distract me, if I wanted to interact with somebody close to me, my parents filled that role.  In most houses, you see children play various sorts of games with each other.  I'd certainly do that with friends, but there was no playing board games or card games with my siblings. I've never developed an affinity for card games, although both of my parents were good at them, and my father taught them to me.  For board games, however, my father was the go to.  It wasn't until I was an adult that I appreciated that most children, if they wanted to play a board game, would do it with a sibling.

Moreover, if adults are your playmates, you enter the adult world very quickly.  And not only that, you enter the adult world of your parents.  Either genetically or through environment, I obtained my parent's love of history very rapidly.  Not only that, however, but I entered it at an adult level quite quickly.  When I went from grade school to junior high at 7th Grade, at which time I was 12 years old, I remember being glad that the library had such adult books.  One of the first I checked out was Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far.  The sight of a short 12-year-old lugging up the massive tome to the library desk caused the librarian to nearly reject checking it out to me, and she warned me that it was a book for adults.  I was stunned.  I was reading adult books at home already, almost all the history tomes.  I loved A Bridge Too Far.

This made me, I suppose, "bookish" and it gave people the illusion that I'm "smart".  My father and mother were both extremely intelligent, likely both geniuses actually, but I'm not as smart as either one of them by a long measure.  I'm just well-read, really.  And being an only child makes you a loner in significant ways, as you do so much all by yourself that other people simply do not.

In my case, this was amplified at age 13 when my mother became profoundly ill.  Then it was me and my father, and from that point on, really, I was an adult.  And for a lot of things, I was an adult with nobody to turn to.  My father was my closest friend, although I certainly had other friends, but the problems you take to your siblings, I bore, like I am sure all only children do, by myself.

I still largely do.

This makes for a rough existence in a lot of ways.  As an adult, I really didn't have anyone to go to advice to.  I mostly made my own decisions, and started doing that at about age 13.  A lot of those decision, made only in the context of my own experience, were wrong.  Being insecure about the state of existence itself due to my mother's condition and due to a childhood asthma condition, I valued security way over that which other people do, which ironically ends up making you potentially insecure in certain fundamental ways.  My post high school academic career can probably be defined by that.  I studied geology first, and then law, not because of a deep love of the topic, but because they seemed to offer secure occupations.

My father died when I was in my 30s.  My mother when I was much older, I think in my early 50s.  With them both gone, there is no connection like that.  My wife was great during my mother's illness, particularly since they did not get along, but the strain of that did not help in our relationship and continues to have a lasting impact.  I can't go to siblings like she does with family problems, and her being the one I'm closest to on earth means that I'm uniquely vulnerable there in a way, frankly, that she is not.  My connection with things, basically, is razor-thin.

I note all of this for a simple reason.

Being a teenager without siblings proved to be difficult.  As a young adult, out in the world like young men are, I didn't notice it at all, but once my parents started their final descent, the lack of a sibling was agonizing.  As I've aged now into my 60s, I feel imperiled by it.  I wish I had a brother to talk to, like my father did, or like my mother did.

I don't understand why married couples forego children, and in a lot of ways I feel that people who don't have kids never really become adults.  Those having children, however, shouldn't have a single child.  It's not fair to the child.

Wake up calls.

Big traumas certainly serve as wake-up calls.  The question is, however, if a person has just awakened too late.

I firmly believe that people are capable of reinventing themselves.  Often people don't know to do that until some external force compels it.  At that point, they're left with the choice of reformation or continuing on in their former path's.  Reformation is hard, but people do it.

Take, as an example, Georgy Malenkov.

Malenkov graduated school in 1917, just before the Russian Revolution, and he served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He became a commissar in 1920.  He rose steadily in the Communist party, surviving Stalin's purges, and was the head of its nuclear missile program when that era arrived.  He became a member of the Central Committee, the real ruling body in the USSR.  He suffered a downfall, however, when he tried to stage a coup against Khrushchev, and was accordingly expelled from his positions.

Khrushchev was decidedly an opponent of the Church.  Malenkov had never been adherent in his adult life.  But upon his release from position, he converted to Russian Orthodoxy and became a lector, which in the Russian Orthodox Church is a minor order of clergy.

Dramatic change.

It probably wouldn't have come about, however, but for his fall from grace from Soviet leadership.  A coup attempt against Khrushchev fell, he fell, and he fell into the Church,.  It's almost like what Shane MacGowan noted in A Rainy Night In Soho.

We watched our friends grow up together

And we saw them as they fell

Some of them fell into Heaven

Some of them fell into Hell

The lucky ones choose to fall into Heaven, the obstinate ones choose to fall into Hell.

Save for the fact that some people find the alarm bell going off a bit too late.

The glory of being a trial lawyer.

The dirty little secret. . . there isn't any.

One of the nice things about being in a farm community as a working travelers is that their Sunday morning Masses usually start really early, as in 7:00 a.m. in this case.

At least not like portrayed in the movies, and certainly not like the silly "whaling for justice" type of stuff that the plaintiff's bar likes to shovel out.

Recently I tried a case out of town. I've tried so many in the past three decades I no longer have any idea how many I've tried, and if I stopped to try to count them, I know that I'd be inaccurate.  When you apply for a judicial appointment, which I've done several times, unsuccessfully (obviously), you are required to count them up, and I'm sure my numbers weren't the same any time I did that, even though I made an effort to be correct.

I do know that the year COVID restrictions on the courts lifted, I tried three that year.  That may not sound like a lot, but for a civil litigator it is.  I know quite a few civil litigators who have tried less than that over decades' long careers.  One law school colleague of mine who does the same work, has never, in so far as I know, tried a case.  An ABA review I once read of lawyers who had long civil careers and then retired (which seems to be a rarity) remarked that one of the subjects was proud of her "six" trials.

Six.

Hah.

There are a lot of reason there are not very many civil trials and even fewer serious civil trials, but one reason is that trials are hard stressful work.

But I'll get to that.

This past year, dating back a year ago or so, has not been a good one for me on a personal level.  I had surgery in the fall and missed the hunting season.  It was colon surgery, and I've never completely recovered, which is to say that my digestive track has not returned to normal, and it isn't going to.  During that process, it was revealed by a scan that I had a major thyroid nodule.  Followup on that showed it to almost certainly be cancerous, so during the trial, was looking forward to a second surgery, a partial thyroidectomy, and if really lucky I won't have to take medicine for the rest of my life.  There is, however, a good chance that I will have to. 

Having  the trial to accomplish meant that I didn't have to think about it, however.

In terms of good news, it turned out to be benign. Strange, but benign.  It's basically a result of an old injury, one I don't ever recall sustaining.

Current wound status.

Hopefully the recovery time isn't really long, but it varies quite a bit for people.  

I ended up never taking a day off from the second surgery, not even the day of the surgery, which was a mistake, I'll note.

Anyhow, for about a year running now, my life has been nothing but work.  As noted, I missed the hunting season and what little I got in prior to surgery was marred by being incredibly tired.  I'm not sure what was up with that (perhaps the thyroid), but I was.  I couldn't go for big game after that least I rip my stitches out.  

I did get out for waterfowl quite a bit late in the season, mostly on Sunday's after Mass.  I'd work on Sundays but for the Commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, which I take seriously, although occasionally I find myself working on that day too.

That's mostly a reflection of my personality.

The trial in question had been from a pre COVID case and it finally rolled around to to.  Just before it did, my opponent let me know that his young female partner was leaving, and she did before the trial commenced.  I was stunned, really, as she was bailing out of a really good firm and she's a really good lawyer.  She was leaving private practice to go in house.  

No more trials for her.

Then my younger female partner let me know she was leaving. She stuck with me through the trial.

Finding a lawyer you can comfortably try cases with isn't easy.  Frankly, maybe one in ten lawyers who do trial work are really talented at it and of those, maybe only 10% anyone one person meshes with well enough to have that role.  But here she definitely did.  Her leaving is a big loss to me, just as my opponent's younger counsel leaving was a big loss to him.  I don't know, really, if I'll be able to replace her.

For some time I've frankly wondered how she does it, as she's married with young children.  When I was first practicing law, the female litigators I'd meet, and they were few, tended to be childless, often by choice.  Quite a few women started to come into the law about the time that I did, and by and large if they were married and started to have children, they dropped out of practice.  It was just too much of a burden.

This recalls the old phrase, supposedly written by Jean Little, a Canadian author:

A man can work from sun to sun, But a woman's work is never done.

There's a lot of truth to that, quite frankly.

For some reason, even in our "modern" age, the traditional division of labor in which women are burdened with raising children while they're young and keeping the household has never gone away, even when the woman of the house is a professional and its first breadwinner.  Perhaps its simply genetic, although we're not supposed to say that.  About the only relief I see them getting is from willing grandparents, really, and that too, oddly enough, is a very traditional role for grandparents.

Anyhow, juggling a household and having a professional job that requires long hours and travel. . . that's brutal.  I don't blame these women a bit for seeking something else out.

One more example of how our modern "you live to serve this ship" lifestyle makes no sense and makes nobody happy.

You always go to the location of the trial early.

On Sunday, I looked out of my hotel window and saw this:

Horses by an old homestead, still being farmed.

Sigh.

The only thing I got out to do was to go to Mass.

I like everyone to have their own vehicles at a trial.  It gives everyone some independence.  If I control things, and at my age I do, everyone drives themselves.  

This, I'll note, isn't the case with some lawyers, although it is with all the ones I know.  Those people must be the really extraverted ones who just think everyone needs lots of sharing time all the time, and therefore they make the whole team prisoners to their automobile.

Hotels have evolved quite a bit in the past thirty years.  Thirty years ago I'd look for a hotel with a restaurant and then catch breakfast.  Now, most hotels that I stay at are "business hotels" which means that they have a light kitchen with the bare minimum. As breakfast is an afterthought with me anyhow, I’m good to go with that.

I’m not good to go with these monstrosities:

I hate Keurig machines and their stupid one cup at a time system.  I always have.  I never drink just one cup of coffee bu several, and I don't want to screw around making endless little cups. To make matters worse, it's invariably the case that the person who stocks the rooms leaves you hardly any real coffee, but lots of stuff like Ceylonese Green Herbal Tea or something. 

Blech.

We always go down and get a bunch of real coffee for the stupid Keurig machine.

One thing about trials is you get to wear your cool dress shoes that otherwise would look odd in our modern era.

These are saddle oxfords.  Saddle oxfords made from buffalo hide, I might add.  

I've never worn out, I might note, a pair of dress shoes.  I have my black low quarters from basic training still.  When I was first practicing, I bought a pair of wingtips made in Ireland, just like the dress shoes my father had when I was young. They've been resoled once, but they're still in good shape.

Indeed, I only have five pairs of dress shoes, one being the aforementioned Army low quarters I very rarely wear.  I'm never going to need to buy another pair.

I do need to shine them.

Parking lot view.

One thing about doing a trial in farm country is that it always causes me to think how lucky some people are that they get to farm as a career.

I don't think they appreciate that.

I never think that about trying a case in a big city.  I've tried cases twice in Denver and wasn't envious of a soul associated with Denver. The poor judge looked like he'd been rode hard and put away wet in the second one. Denver itself, out on the street, was like a Middle Easter Dysentery Ward in the 30s.  The jurors had jobs I wouldn't have wanted.  

Grim.

In farm country you see, however, people living the way that people are supposed to live.

Restaurant view.  The field below is one I've hunted geese in.

I constantly hear people in agriculture complain about it, and by that I don't mean the weather or something, but about being in agriculture itself.  Maybe complaining is just something people do.  Pascal noted:

If a soldier or labourer complain of the hardship of his lot, set him to do nothing.

I'm not sure what Pascal was aiming at there, but I think it might have been that people just complain.  I also think, however, that a lot of people who were born into agriculture have no idea what other work is like, including working as a professional.   

I turned 60 recently as well, which of course is a sort of milestone for many people, although I really didn't pay that much attention to it at the time.  It really started to set in, however, when I attended a mule action by video. Everything was too expensive, and I didn't buy anything, but leading up to it, I got a fair amount of opposition from my spouse.  Most of it was of the nature of "you don't have time".

I don't have time, which is because I work a work schedule at the office, in this civil litigator line of country, that's very heavy.  I work a schedule that's heavier than a lot of lawyers in their 20s and 30s.  I have nobody, I guess, but myself to blame for that, sort of.  Part of it too has to do with the circumstances during which I came up in the law, and part of it has to do with my own character.

When I was young, before I was a lawyer, I wanted to work outdoors.

It's never really stopped being in a least the back of my mind.  The net effect of that is that from the exterior I'm one of the rare trial lawyers who tries a lot of cases.  I'm cited to other lawyers that way, and because of the work that comes through my door, it's pretty obvious that my reputation as a trial lawyer is impossible to escape.  But part of the reason that I can't escape it is that those immediately around me, including those closest to me, see me that way and can't imagine a world in which I'm not yoked to the plow in this fashion.

Elijah set out, and came upon Elisha, son of Shaphat, as he was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen; he was following the twelfth. Elijah went over to him and threw his cloak on him.

Elisha left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, “Please, let me kiss my father and mother good-bye, and I will follow you.” Elijah answered, “Go back! What have I done to you?”

Elisha left him and, taking the yoke of oxen, slaughtered them; he used the plowing equipment for fuel to boil their flesh, and gave it to the people to eat. Then he left and followed Elijah to serve him.

1 Kings, Chapter 19.

I've always thought Elisha's actions baffling.  But they are not.  He was wanting to set out with Elijah, who had just anointed him his successor.  When he left the oxen and spoke to Elijah, Elijah seemed annoyed and told him to go back.

Yoke's were expensive, and so were oxen.  By burning his wooden yokes, there was no going back.

If this seems harsh, consider the similar lines from Luke in the New Testament:

As they were proceeding on their journey someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus answered him, “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.”

And to another he said, “Follow me.” But he replied, “[Lord,] let me go first and bury my father.” But he answered him, “Let the dead bury their dead.* But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

And another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.”  Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.” 

In modern American life we imagine we can always go back and most of us live our lives that way.  Had Elisha decided, well, I'll plow the field and bring in the crops and take up being a prophet later, he wouldn't have become a prophet.  Those setting a hand to the plow, and looking back, don't plow a straight row.

And so back to the main.

There's really no glory in trial work, in spite of what people like to imagine.  It's hard work.  If you win, your clients view the victory as theirs.  If you lose, it's your fault.  Everyone wins some and loses some, and moreover, wins some they should lose and lose some they should win.  It's so stressful that most civil litigators, truth be known, and this includes both plaintiffs and defendants lawyers, won't try a case.  Those who will tend to be a tiny minority, and we try lots of cases, because we will.  You get used to a lot of the things about it, but like the way Jock Lewes is portrayed in SAS, Rogue Heroes (stay tuned for a review shortly), some of that is suppression of anxiety rather than its elimination, although anxiety does indeed decrease with time.  People who run around claiming they love everything about a trial tend to be weirdos or liars, more often the latter than the former.

And, for what its worth, I've tried a minor case since this one.

Some random musings. Old Age, Worn Out Horses, Secrets.

The freeze

What happened to Mitch McConnell yesterday and to me 35 years ago.

ROBERT REICH

An insightful article by Robert Reich, who experienced something similar.

While I'm sure that I'm beating a dead horse on this, this is yet again evidence that we do come with a wear out date, and we ought to accordingly be careful.  So should society.  A huge amount of our societal deposit of power is in the truly ancient.

Mind you, I don't agree with Reich on much of McConnell's record being repugnant.  He did a great job, in my view, with the Supreme Court.  That's one of the things that Reich now doubt feels is skunking up the room.  And by this point, McConnell's presence may truly be necessary as a brake on what would occur if Donald Trump regains the White House, as McConnell seems to be able to control Senate Republicans, which in part has kept the Senate from becoming the circus that the House of Representatives currently is.

McConnell is 81.

Our senior Senator is 71.  Our junior Senator is 68.  Our Congressman is 60.

The world is enduring a really hot summer this year.  This is hard to ignore.

Sixteen young Montanans have sued their state for embracing fossil fuels in the face of climate change.  Nothing like that has happened in Wyoming.  I don't know what the average Wyomingite under 30 feels about this issue, or believes about it, but I'll bet it's not the same for Wyomingites who are 60 and over.  We probably worry about it, if we do, in the context of our children and their children.  Of course, if you are our youngest member of Congress, which isn't to say young, you have no children to worry about.

It used to be wars that caused this sort of observation.  Old men started them, it was claimed, and young men fought them.  Now it seems that really old men start them and young men and women, given that we've grown more barbarous in recent decades and included women in this horror, fight them.  The "old men" of the 1940s mostly weren't all that old, in comparison to what we have now.  Anyhow, I really wonder what approach to many things we'd be taking if people who were at least under 50 years of age were at the wheel.

Would that this was so.

On a somewhat related item, I've really been noticing recently that collapses that should be obvious to those close to collapsing aren't, at least to some extent.  I guess if people have relied upon somebody for a long time, they'll just ride that horse until it collapses, and then they're surprised.  Even the warnings that the metaphorical horse gives, as it stumbles or becomes blurry eyed, don't mean much.  The horse is just whipped into carrying on.  When it rolls over and dies, the rider is surprised.

I've been noticing recently that certain people turn everything very much to themselves.

Maybe everyone does to some degree.  People are told a story, and they want to show it's relevant to them as well, so they tell something related.

That's not really what I mean.

Rather, because for most of us our own frustrations and sufferings are the ones we really understand, it's hard for some not to use those as an absolute yardstick.

Indeed, I've witnessed recently somebody who fits into the category above, they're heavily burdened and collapsing, and they're pretty much trying to get some support.  However, when they seek to get it, they instead get tales, mostly repeats, of the other persons' frustrating, but not really epic, work life.  While it would be a poor comparison, it would be like a person going into the emergency room and telling the receptionist that they have a gunshot wound, only to get a really detailed reply like "I know, let me tell you about how slow the lunch line is here".

In this case, the suffering soul is pretty much the plow mule for the household, and the mule is on its last legs.  It's pretty obvious, but it must not actually be within the household, or they're so used to it, it goes unobserved.  But the signs are sure there.  The collapse is coming, and I don't know how to stop it.  Only the people driving the mule probably can, and they don't seem to believe it's going to happen.

Of course, it's really hard to appreciate that giants fall.  Some big tree grows in the forest, and It's always there.  It gets old, starts to die, and then one day a windstorm comes by and knocks it over.  People are surprised until they look at the photos of it when it was in its vigor.

Some people are horrible about keeping secrets.

I don't mean that they can't keep them, I mean that they love secretes too much.

There are things in the world that need to be kept secret.  Some occupations have secret keeping as a feature of their nature, such as doctors, priests, and lawyers.

But other people just adore secrets. They make secret information solely for the sake of making it secret.

My long-suffering spouse is one of these people.  She loves secrets.

I was reminded of this recently as I have a medical procedure coming up.  It's not a secret, why would it be?  But she was keeping it a secret from her family. That's really nifty, of course, for me as I don't keep stuff like this secret at all, and I don't have any concept why a person would do that.  Of course, it caught up with me when I was texting to my father-in-law, as he was at a cattle sale.  I mentioned it as I thought he knew.  My mother-in-law was calling in an instant, to my wife.

Why was this a secret?

I don't know, but that was bullshit, and I have repeatedly told my wife that I hate this "this is a secret" crap.  It's so ingrained in her character, however, that it's impossible to break.  Minor routine information is secret to outside parties.

This is aided by the fact, however, that she's good at keeping secrets, a fact that's further aided by her being bad at conveying necessary information.  I'll often get really important news about somebody weeks after it's conveyed to her.

"Bob is dying of the Grip", I'll learn. Oh, when did we learn this?  Weeks ago.

Or, "don't forget, this weekend we're hauling cattle".  Eh?  I've already committed myself to working this weekend, when did you learn this?  Yeah, weeks ago.  "I forgot to tell you".

On the other side, I guess, I've come to absolutely detest secrets.  Only things that legitimately need to be kept secret.  I guess having lived a life of professionally keeping secrets, while watching lots of people keep stuff they shouldn't keep secret until it blows up in their face, has made me detest them.   

Oh, well.

Tuesday, March 6, 1923. The Halibut Treaty. Formation of the Egyptian Feminist Unioin (الاتحاد النسائي المصري), Irish blood borthers.

Canada and the United States signed the Convention for the Preservation of Halibut Fishery of the Northern Pacific Ocean, referred to commonly as the "Halibut Treaty".  It was the first treaty Canada signed without involving the United Kingdom.  The environmental treaty was a pioneering treat regulating the fishing of halibut.

Halibut are just about the tastiest fish ever.

Alaska fishermen cleaning halibut.

In some unrealistic alternative version of me, in the summer I travel to Alaska to fish for salmon and halibut, before working my way south through the Yukon and Alberta to catch the early game seasons there, before returning to the Cowboy State.  Due to multiple citizenship, I'd never touch a foreign land.

But, in reality, Monday through Friday I'll be in my office.

On the same day, German Chancellor Cuno told the Reichstag, smarting over the Belgian and French (the Belgian part is typically forgotten) armed occupation of the Ruhr, that Germany would not negotiate with the French directly, but only through an intermediary.

While the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr is now nearly universally condemned, it should be recalled that the two Francophone countries had seen substantial armed occupation at the hands of a non-repentant Germany, which in both instances had killed civilians in ways that would foreshadow the Second World War.  Had the French simply remained in the Ruhr, it might be recalled, or enforced their treaty rights at the time that the Germans under Hitler reoccupied it, the Second World War would not have occurred.

British Prime Minister Bonar Law, for his part, was being pressured on the same day to form a more definitive stance to the situation.

The Egyptian Feminist Union  (الاتحاد النسائي المصري),  was founded at the home of Egyptian activist Huda Sha'arawi.

تأسس الاتحاد النسائي المصري في منزل الناشطة المصرية هدى شعراوي.

It still exists.

Five Irish soldiers were killed by a Republican booby trap at Baranarigh Wood in Kerry.  The following day a bloody reprisal was carried out by the Free State against nine IRA prisoners.

Pilots of the United States Army Air Corps posed for this photograph:

Dapper men in an extremely dangerous job.

Children had fun with an elephant in Miami, before fun suckers took the joy out of all such things, and out of much of daily life as well.

A Thankgiving Day pondering.

(Note, this is one of many post that was lingering in the draft section for years, and was only now posted).

Something has happened . . . some ground moving departure from reality in the West.  But was it a slow evolution, or a rapid one.  Has it always been occurring, and does that mean perhaps we're just on the crest of a big wave, and some future generations will look back and see this era as simply insane?

When you are in the midst of something, it's not really obvious that it's occurring until it's far advanced, whether that change is for good or ill.  I'm sure, for example, Neanderthals didn't appreciate that the arrival of Cro Magnons in the neighborhood signaled the end of their human line, as for the very first of them, it didn't. The first Shoshone to meet a European American probably didn't think; "well. .  better ask for a reservation bordering the Wind Rivers right now". . . that's not how human experience work.

But at some point, at least for the observant, that day does arrive when you can look out and say "this is really amiss", but that doesn't mean that you grasp how it went amiss.

Well, things are amiss.

That's been obvious to me for a long time, but not to the degree to which it currently is, and not with what seems to be the clarity which I think I have on it now.  But, suffice it to say, at some point we boarded the train to unnatural existence, and it's plaguing us now.  Getting back will not be easy, and while I think nature and providence always self correct, I won't live long enough to see that correction.

It's important to note, when you state such things, that a perfect past never existed.  Other people, who sense something is wrong and turn their gaze back, far too often imagine a perfect past in some distant era.  That was never the case.  There was never a Camelot.

And even if there might have been a real Arthur of some sort, and even if he was a chieftain of some type, it was still the case that for most people the world hasn't been prefect.

Being a Medieval lord, in other words, may have been grand, but eking out your existence on a handful of oats and barley every day as a bound serf. . . not so much.

And so with every era.  Being a Roman magistrate would have been nifty, probably. A Roman slave? Not.  Being an American in 1830 would seem cool to me. . . as long as I wasn't black or an Indian on the border of lands about to be consumed by the American nation.

You get my point.

But one thing that has occurred since those times, or at least since the late period of the Roman Empire, is that we, and by that I mean Western Society, and which by that I mean the force that seems to drag the entire world along with it, has slipped into some sort of perverse anti-natural state.

How did that happen?

And when did it start to occur?