I'm back.

Sorry about the delay -- I had a trial last week, which means that I was slammed the week before getting ready, and slammed this week cleaning up all of the messes that my other cases turned into while I was busy doing my best Clarence Darrow impersonation.

Trials are a funny thing for lawyers. Contrary to the impression you might have from a lifetime of watching Perry Mason or Alan Shore, most of us law job guys and gals tend to have more than one case at a time. On any given day, you might learn that favorite client (they don't argue about your bills and they pay within 30 days) Finklestein Industries has just been served with a lawsuit, and you start preparing a motion to dismiss. But you have to stop work on the motion at 3 o'clock because you have a hearing over in Beaucoup Egypt on a discovery dispute in the Acme Manufacturing/Coyote Consulting litigation. And meanwhile, that cute court reporter is on the phone wondering if you want to buy the transcript from the MacGillicuddy deposition, and you are hoping that she left in all of the "uh's" and "um's" and incomprehensible mumbles of the idiot questioner who wasted five hours of your life eliciting approximately 15 minutes of useful testimony, and you know you need the transcript, but the client is going to whine about paying $600 for it. And so you walk into the kitchen and stick your head in the microwave to end it all.

Anyway, real life is nothing like your trial practice class in law school, where the climax of the semester was that one, single, solitary trial -- all about how to get those bastards at Mismo Fire Insurance to pay the Flinders Aluminum claim. That rocked. You were on fire (hah!) to try that case, and you lived breathed ate drank fucked that case, and everything was a complete rush. You owned the courtroom, and all of the witnesses sang the song you taught them. And you beat that insurance company (always so happy to cash the premium checks, yet so reluctant to pay claims) like a red-headed stepchild.* And you knew that this trial thing rocked.

But, alas, here in the real world, we have many more than one case to worry about. Which explains, in part, why so many so-called trial lawyers don't try cases. They can't afford to be out of the office for weeks in trial on a single case at the expense of neglecting all of their others. And so we settle cases -- probably 90% of them.

It's weird, really. Litigators like to think of themselves as surgeons -- they come in, fix the problem, and then go. Transactional lawyers, we sniff, are the internists of the legal world -- dealing with the day to day stuff like contracts and real estate and reporting and all of that other stuff.

Except surgeons, on the day that you are scheduled to have that tumor removed, don't come into your hospital room and say things like "listen, Ted, I just got off the phone with the tumor, and he's agreed that he won't spread into your lungs if you let him take the bones. I think that that's a reasonable offer -- we could go in to take him out, and you could die on the table. Plus, there's always the risk of infection. The tumor pointed out that this hospital had a real problem with staph a few years ago. What's that? Yes, I do remember telling you that I had completed several successful surgeries against this type of tumor, But that was before I found out that you concealed a 50 year history of smoking. When that came out, well, it changed things. Yes, I think that we can make a counter -- maybe tell him that we don't agree to him taking the bones, and if he's stubborn about it, we can just threaten to zap him with some radiation . . . "

*Apologies to red-heads. I am a huge fan of Nicole Kidman in "Moulin Rouge." And apologies to step-children. I was a step-child, twice. I was going to use ". . . like a rented mule," but I was afraid of the inevitable PETA protest. Those fuckers are mean.

Mother, should I run for president.

Yesterday was my mother's birthday. She would have been 74 -- she died a few years ago, very quickly (like less than a month and a half) after her diagnosis. By the time they saw it, the cancer had spread from her lungs to her bones and to her brain. (She went to the hospital with a back-ache -- it was the cancer in her bones.) Oddly, she had had pneumonia about a year earlier, and nothing showed up on any of the gazillion lung x-rays.

I was thinking about her last night when I couldn't get to sleep (cause or effect?). I still get mad thinking about some of the things she did/failed to do. For example, I still wish that she hadn't moved from The Ancestral Homeland when my father died, but I understand why she made that decision.

She had a great relationship with my daughter. And with my wife -- although they are two *very* different people. She lived with my grandmother for most of the time after my grandfather died -- and took care of her for a long time after my grandmother's mind started to go.

And she opened her home to those in need -- her pregnant 17 year old niece, her alcoholic nephew, countless friends who were in between jobs or homes or spouses.

Life was not terribly fair to her. Her husband died when she was the age I am now, leaving her with 5 kids. 5 bratty kids (well, at least one bratty kid). She survived breast cancer in her fifties. She watched her mother slowly descend into Alzheimer's, taking care of her at home until the last possible moment -- and then, one month after the trauma of putting her mother into a home, in a nice little "fuck you" from the universe, she was hit with her final cancer diagnosis.

Despite this, she dealt. She never whined, and she at least had her family around her when she passed away at home under Hospice care.

And, since I am half watching Olberman and Russert, I should note that she was born a New Deal Democrat into a machine family, and stuck with the donkey through thick and thin. She wasn't a huge fan of Hillary's, so she probably would be pleased that Obama has (apparently) won the nomination.

Anyway, happy belated birthday, Mom.