I Do My Own Stunts: Finding the Way as an Attorney

Clause.

I.In the Beginning.

I’ve always felt a little special. The problem is, I haven’t done anything special. I haven’t made a lot of money – if you didn’t realize, most lawyers aren’t wealthy. I buy shirts at Costco – they are good shirts. I haven’t become prominent in my field – I am a generally known quantity in commercial debt collection practice here in town, but Atlanta has very knowledgeable attorneys who publish scholarly articles. Not that I particularly want prominence if it involves publishing articles. Some commercial debt collection attorneys make me feel normal. Many of them are friends.

Sure, I’ve done things which felt special. I won’t count that time in high school that we tried to sprint through the turnstiles at Epcot Center without paying. Hint: someone chases you. I won’t count all the places I’ve been, because lots of people are well-travelled, especially nowadays. I can’t really count academic achievements, because somebody else helped me, mostly my Mom and Dad. More about them later. That leaves us with the fact that I’ve studied several languages and learned to play some classical piano pieces – nice, but not special. Being a lawyer is definitely not special – ask most people trying to practice nowadays. A special headache, maybe. I have not overcome a life-threatening illness or discovered anything new.

So why have I felt special? The search for that answer has been complicated and has led me on a different path. My life may not be special but it has been unusual.

A.Time Immemorial.

I grew up on the Southside of Atlanta, Georgia – not a region of high culture, for sure, but it shaped me to the core nonetheless. Some things are just in your blood. This city has exploded during the last twenty years with terrific force, but somehow, in spite of the traffic and the sprawl, we haven’t changed that much, just enough to stay vital, maybe now more than ever. The New South is real, and not in the wishful sense that term was used a hundred years ago, when we lagged behind the North in everything. However, while often prosperous, we remain somewhat unrefined, comparatively.

My grandfathers were not urbanites. Dad’s father built a little white house in a valley in East Tennessee – when the local yokels came knocking one night at the door not long after the house was built, he came out shooting. They found blood in the new cornfield the next day. That grandfather once got a ticket from a town cop and wrestled down the poor man, who retracted the ticket. Today that would be a felony, I suspect. Dad’s dad also traded livestock and grew tobacco, when he wasn’t serving as the town postmaster during Republican administrations. (You may recall the Deep South was Democrat following the War, but you may not have known the mountain people were generally for the Union.) Rufus and Maude (real names) actually lived well for that area, meticulously caring for their home and farm and having a reputation for being upright people, even when the surroundings were tough. That area is still tough today, maybe even tougher.

Mom’s father moved from South Alabama, where he claimed he learned to fight every day, to Florida around the time of the Depression and original real estate crash in that state. I do not know whether that qualified him as a real Florida Cracker, but he was certainly an expressive redneck and not scared to settle a matter by brawling. I know he had several altercations at his Orlando men’s wear store and that he once knocked a guy trying to snatch my aunt’s purse all the way down the New York subway stairs. He later moved to the mountains of North Carolina, where he himself cleared and graded the wild land. Thanks to him, the city-dwellers now have mountain homes in the pastures of my childhood summers.

Both of these men rose far beyond what could have been, but you have to see where they began in order to appreciate them. They rose above in times and places of few opportunities. I do not think there is a modern analogy. Back then, almost a hundred years ago, most people did not travel, did not have access to information, and did not have much help from outside the family. Institutions were not developed, certainly not in the South. Really, we weren’t far past the grainy photos of the Civil War; however, the country through that bloodbath had been united in an important way. My mother’s father heard from his grandfather, who fought for Alabama in the War, how at the end they carried heavy long rifles in the winter without shoes. People in this country today have no concept of those conditions.

Decades later, my father’s older brothers went, along with countless others, to fight in Europe and in the Pacific. For months, their mother did not know what was happening to them – people got their news from the Knoxville paper. Occasionally a man would come around to a local home with word that a soldier had died. Of course, my uncles fought not as Tennesseans but as Americans, for a valiant cause, and they lived to tell about it – but they didn’t much like to tell about it. That War, too, was a horrible affair – if you go to Germany today, see what amount of the original old town quarters are still standing (not much). Just like the South a century earlier, these enemies would not stop fighting and had to be knocked out. One uncle went to Hiroshima after the bomb and later told my father it looked like scalding water had been poured over everything. He was a Marine and also recounted that, during the island-hopping, a Japanese soldier once jumped onto his back in the jungle, maybe on Saipan, and after a wild ride the man ran away. Germany and Japan were civilized for centuries, and yet they had gone crazy – Americans caught the world by the tail and changed it. My point is, we were a nation not only united, but energized. People all over the country were fighting for something bigger than themselves and their communities.

My father was a child during the Second World War, living in that white house in the valley. His town was small but still largely wholesome – not ravaged by drugs and shiftlessness as much of Appalachia is today. His parents were respected and he could have made a life there – not to mention it is some of the most beautiful country on earth. However, he did not want to stay. He was smart, with ambition, and he saw how well a relative did as a dentist. So he went to college and professional school, and, after a time in the Air Force, he had seen enough to know that his future was not in Newport, Tennessee. I have been many times in Newport, and there are intelligent, good people there, as everywhere – just not the opportunities of a city. Life is simpler, for the most part. And my father is not a simple person, in many ways.

He met my mother, the homecoming queen in her Orlando-area high school, and he set up a dental practice south of Atlanta after his military service. They weren’t Georgia people, but it didn’t matter as much, since people were coming here from all over the South. (That trend continues to this day, only now they come from all over the country.) Her father hunted on the land that would become Disney World, so my mother was not from the Orlando of today, either. However, the two of them wanted progress – which they found in the growing Capital of the South. Atlanta has been a consistently livable city, if anything.

My father took full advantage of his new hometown. As a dentist, and later as an orthodontist, he had a little extra to invest, and he turned to Atlanta’s greatest resource – real estate. He bought a parcel here, an apartment complex there. This endeavor may not seem as implausible when you consider the low values of the Sixties and Seventies, when there were roughly a million people in the city and little premium on space, which has seemed limitless until recently. Dad’s formula has always been simple – be able to see your way in and out of a project, i.e., buy or construct a commercial property which will not only hold its value but also generate revenue enough to pay it off and have something left over. And this formula has worked – for being a medical professional, he has been very adept at weathering the storm and stress of our real estate market, one of the most adept people I know, really. He built two nice office buildings, which he rented to quality commercial tenants. He also designed and built with my Mom an unusually beautiful house set back in a field surrounded by woodlands, into which we moved when I started middle school. It had plenty of room for Dad’s antique car collection, not to mention acreage enough to shoot a .22 long rifle in any direction without worrying about the neighbors. More about that house later.

Dad pushed himself. As an outsider, he was really ahead of the curve, more than I ever realized. Not everyone welcomes a newcomer, especially a successful one. He took people to lunch, got involved in civic organizations. Mid-twentieth century, there were no mass advertising or enormous dental practices – it was all referrals from satisfied clients or being in the right location. In the late Sixties, Dad went back to school for orthodontics in New Jersey – good move, because that specialty set him apart. Plus, he is manually dexterous and precise, the perfect skill set for his profession. I remember his office with cabinets and cabinets full of patient records, with four dental chairs and people coming through all of them every thirty minutes or hour. And, although inflicting pain, he was really friendly to people – Why bother?, my immature self often wondered. Now a lawyer, I understand all too well. And people loved his work – he made their smiles look good.

Dad worked probably too hard. He was home every night, for sure, a family man. But he would be tired. I understand that now, too. We rested at night, watched game shows together, very sedate atmosphere. The purpose was to get up the next day and do it again. Even with the solid routine, Dad had a heart attack in the late Seventies – Mom had been warning him. Some of it was genetic, but the sheer volume of patients was overwhelming, he now believes. So he cut out some patient volume, cut out some red meat, cut out smoking his pipe – but he kept working hard. And he kept investing in commercial property and securities.

As for Mom, she was happy but she sacrificed herself, too. She was the glue that held it all together. She was the popular girl in highschool, the cheerleader, the friend to all. The devotion did not change, but the outgoing style did, I understand – she became quieter over the years, as Dad became more successful and they mixed with wealthier people. I do not think the problems of adulthood and success made her more cynical, but I believe some of the effervescence calmed over time, as a result of the role she chose to play. She too had quit a small town for a more complicated city. I think success changed my parents for the better, but in many ways they maintained their small-town outlook, which has been challenging for us all. In the transitions which followed my youth, perspectives played a very important part.

It is only through becoming myself that I have understood even some of my parents’ lives. How easy to call them simple! Even more so their parents, so long ago.

B.A Restless Spirit.

I appeared in the story in 1971, just after the national unrest of the Sixties. My Dad tells of driving through the District of Columbia in ’68 and hiding their Georgia plates so that no one would smash the car. A black woman, Nettie Ruth Hand, daughter of a sharecropper, helped to raise me and my sister Donna; this gentle soul formed my first understanding of