LEX INTERRUPTUS

Well, it’s been more than a year since the COVID tsunami swept over the New Haven legal community, once the Happy Valley of Connecticut’s legal landscape. It’s changed us from sprinters, middle-distance runners, and marathoners to unwilling enrollees in an underwater aerobics class, uncomfortable in new surroundings, subjected to unfamiliar routines, ill-defined goals and limited, artificial social contacts. The carpe diem mindset, always difficult to maintain even on good days, has transitioned to manana.

So, I now find myself a repository of unsatisfying and frustrating observations, experiences, and insights.

1. I have become the Prince of Procrastination. After closing of the courts, limited access to our office, a perpetual motion kaleidoscope of artificial court dates and the lack of any pressing obligations, I do nothing. I am reminded of Bum Phillips, the NFL coach who, after retirement was asked how he liked it, responded, “Good. I don’t do nothing, and I don’t start ‘til noon.” I have mastered monitoring the comings and goings of people in the building outside my window. I conscientiously conduct a daily review of junk-mail. I spend more than enough time on the New York Times word games. I am living, I feel, in Gertrude Stein’s Oakland where “There is no there there.”

2. The 1 ½ minute phone call has disappeared. It used to be that a call was, “Okay. Court is on Thursday. Bring money. 9:30. See you there.” That call now becomes a half hour of a polite chatter about family and weather and only then about the fee. Calls with other lawyers consist of inquiries about health, family, vaccinations, complaints about courts and philosophizing about when will it end and what will it be like when it does. On some days if I didn’t get robocalls about paying school loans, extending car warrantee, or learning that my Social Security would be terminated from an accented person in a busy call center, the phone wouldn’t ring at all.

I used to see people around frequently. Lots of people. Now, however, not having seen people, I thirst for people to talk to. This includes people I barely know. I reach out on a daily basis to people who I thought I knew and engage them in lengthy phone conversations. And they’re all the same. You can almost script them. They are as bland as what used to be Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice.

3. I miss walking out of Court. All of us miss being in Court and doing whatever it is we do there. There is one aspect, however, I didn’t really appreciate missing until recently. I miss walking out of the courthouse with something on my mind. Either I’m satisfied I’ve done something well; angry I haven’t done something well; or filled with thoughts of things I am going to have to do about the case I just dealt with. Those thoughts keep us alive as lawyers. Without moving in and out of courtrooms and bumping into each other, we are just swimming in a sea of tasteless tapioca.

4. Netflix is a gigantic haystack with far too few needles. I have wasted more time watching portions of video presentations – movies, TV shows, documentaries, stand-ups – that are boring, uninspired, of poor quality or just plain stupid. [I appreciate that adjective applies as well to the person holding the remote.] We have, for a monthly stipend, been provided unlimited access to a wasteland of crap. I should know better by now. I should either stop subscribing or at least, not watch. But that’s not my reality.

My default is the Law and Order Marathon – virtually 48 straight hours of Law and Order – on Thursdays and Fridays on Sundance. Whenever stuck in the middle of Netflix trash I revert to see Lenny and Ed, or Ed and Joe Fontana, or Lenny and Rey serve up Jack McCoy and his latest knit-browed assistant with a vehicle for righteous forensic indignation. You always know what you’re getting, whether you’ve seen it before or not.

5. I have no willpower or self-discipline. You would think, given the amount of free time gifted us, we’d seize the opportunity to do a self-improvement project – woodworking, painting, learning history, maybe a new language, studying the Bible, developing a new legal specialty. Sorry, not me. Please refer back to the first numbered paragraph.

6. The pandemic has spawned a deluge of podcasts. Well, Eleanor, it looks like we’ve come full circle. There was a time when people sat around radios and received information and entertainment. Well, that day has returned. Podcasts are the latest fad. They have replaced kale and quinoa. They can be fascinating and entertaining. They can also be asinine and self absorbed – how can you have three separate podcasts devoted to “The Office”? If you catch The Daily by The New York Times, Criminal, Revisionist History by Malcolm Gladwell, and a whole bunch of others, there is a lot of information and learning available. And, now that the 45th President has been victimized by a stolen election, the hysterical political podcasts boarder the rational.

7. Walking with the Mrs. is a new way of life. Mrs. Dow is much more energetic than her spouse. However, given the lack of anything else to do (or that I am willing to do) – laundry, vacuuming, maintenance – I find myself walking what initially were significant distances with the Mrs. There were times at first, we walked two or three times daily. I have banked those fires. The walks are fewer and shorter but still enjoyable. The key ingredient is listening to audiobooks. Some knock your socks off: Robert Caro’s books on Lyndon Johnson or Robert
Moses; Bad Blood; The Last Trial by Scott Turow; The American Spirit by David McCullough, Born a Sin by Trevor Noah. As Casey Stengel used to say, you can learn a lot by listening.

8. If I put a coat and tie on, I think I am working. Not much to add to that. I was never a fan of “casual Fridays”. I was brought up to think if you were able to go to work in a coat and tie you were one of the privileged. My folks didn’t have that luxury. Dressing up does something to your head and makes you think you are actually working. These last months I almost always wear a coat and tie. And, miraculously, on some of those days whether they’re by a Zoom call, a Teams Meeting or just a bunch of phone calls with angry clients, I delude myself into thinking I’m actually working.

As I look back over the last year and more, I’m trying to recalibrate. I am thinking I should treat it like I’ve been in a serious accident and confined to a body cast for a year. It’s a lost year. No good looking back. I am trying to turn my head to look forward. Sometimes, though, it’s like turning a ship in the Suez Canal.