I spent the rest of the day in a half-stupor, talking quietly because talking at normal volume took too much air and effort. My son noticed, telling me that I was obviously out of it.
My wife is also working furiously on a case in our office, spending hours in front of her monitor, sweating out what she believes is a case of writer’s block.
I can relate, except that for me the block is usually not about putting words to paper - I can write about pretty much anything at any time, as this blog evidences - it’s about anxiety over the subject matter. I freeze when it looks like I will not be able to find a way to solve a problem to my own satisfaction.
I remember having that problem in the early Nineties on a tough case against one of the DeGeurins where they had raised several appellate issues that I just could not solve. I got two or three extensions and the next deadline was looming and I had nothing. I mean nothing. I would come home and obsess over the problem, sleep on it, go back to the office, stab at an argument or two, delete it all, and stare out the window, completely confounded.
And then, as the Greeks say: deus ex machina. For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to how Greek playwrights would write themselves out of an impossible plot corner. A god would lean down from the rafters and solve the human problem with the wave of a hand. It was a giant cop-out for the playwright and was kind of a lame outcome for the audience.
But sometimes it happens in real life. As I despaired, I got a call from DeGeurin’s office that the appealing defendant had dropped dead. As a result, he told me that they would be filing a motion to permanently abate the appeal (which is how appellate courts weirdly resolve an appeal - they don’t dismiss the case, they just abate it, I guess to leave open the option of reinstating the case if, like in The Princess Bride, the defendant turns out to be only “mostly dead.”) I breathed a sigh of relief and shelved the case.
With thirty-plus years under my belt now, I don’t think I’d have had the same problem with that case today - I’d have found some kind of argument - but it’s still something you worry about. Which is Reason # 328 for why I don’t need to be an active lawyer anymore.
Today, my mother and I almost had another example of that kind of thing, but we were rescued by a couple of true public servants.
The problem was this: my mother wanted to register her car in Texas, having moved here from Arkansas. For reasons not clear, Texas charges sales tax for new registrations but offsets the tax with whatever sales tax you paid in your home state. So all we had to do is find my mother’s receipt for the taxes she paid in 2018, or else she would have to pay $900 to the State of Texas.
Despite our best efforts, we could not find the receipt. We had a cancelled check made out to the Arkansas tax authority dated a week after she bought her car, and she had several receipts showing that she had re-registered the car, which they would not have done if she hadn’t paid the tax. But no receipt.
The clerk at the county tax assessor’s office was really sympathetic, and how could she not be? An 88-year-old lady and her aged son politely arguing (and really proving) that she was going to be paying double tax unnecessarily, but she said, not unreasonably, that they needed a receipt tying the payment to the particular car and we didn’t have that.
I grimaced and told my mother that it wasn’t the clerk’s fault, that the law just didn’t have room to bend, and I’d take it up with the State Comptroller to see if someone up there could grant a variance, but in the interim, we were going to have to pay the sales tax. My mother looked like she was going to cry.
And then - deus ex machina! A senior clerk, who had been watching the events unfold, leaned over and told the younger clerk that if my mother transferred ownership of her car to me (while keeping a co-ownership herself), there would be no sales tax, just a $10 transfer fee.
Oof. We all looked at her, gobsmacked by what had just happened. The younger clerk smiled, admiring the workaround, and started the paperwork. I became co-owner of my mother’s car and she saved $900.
Having been a government employee for over thirty years, I always resented the cheap shots taken against public servants as lazy or entitled or dull. In my experience, none of that is true (or at least no more true than in any other business endeavor): these people are caring human beings trying to do the right thing and serve the public.
I admired their imagination and moxie. Those two clerks reaffirmed my faith in public service.
Tomorrow: a Board meeting and I get my car back from the shop. And hopefully, I make a little more progress on getting better.
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