The Calling

No, this entry is not about a current rock group. It is a reaction to an article in the legal newspaper, The Daily Journal, about choosing the law, and whether it is a calling, as in vocation, rather than a career or a job. The distinctions are pretty obvious I guess. If it's just a job, it's about getting the paycheck and doing what you have to do. A career, well, it's something you think you are really good at and feel you have a chance at excelling and moving up the tortious ladder. If it's a calling, well, it is rather a mission, a quest, if you will, to make the world and the relationships among society's denizens more palatable. The author correctly noted that these three categories may overlap in one's life. And one observation made me laugh heartily, when the author noted that the lawyer profile includes a low level of spirituality. Thus, began a few moments of consideration of where I fell in the job vs. career vs. calling categorization. And to tell you the truth (a preface which some psychologists say means you are probably lying), I haven't got a clue which is prominent, if any.

I was 14 when I made the initial decision that being an attorney was my path. No one in my family was a lawyer. I was shy. But I was verbal, and the one thing about being a girl of Mount Saint Ursula was that the nuns, even before the woman's movement, encouraged us to be whatever we wanted to be through education. I guess I was thinking "career" though I would not have articulated that to myself in quite that way. In college, some four or five years later, I ran into the college radio station and THAT was for me, except for the fact that it would not likely mean any money, for a long time, if ever. I loved the studio, the microphone, talking to others without having to face them, if I really examine it. So I went to work after college for WXLO, 99X, it was called, in New York. A friend from college was music director, and I became his assistant. It was kind of him. But the work, if I could call it that, was mind numbing, the same 40 songs on the list week after week. There are just so many times you can hear "Magic Man" even if you love Heart. Six months later law School beckoned, with its promise of a safer career and maybe a regular salary. I responded lethargically pressed by parental anxiety about a future as a bag lady if I did not do something with more concrete future. So, I applied to just two places. And got into one.

I did not like law school. I endured it. It was the late 70s and the teachers all thought they were Professor Kingsfield in the Paper Chase. My school had a conservative grading policy so that I was in the top third of the class, but my average was a C+. No one wanted to hear about how they graded when I interviewed. I ended up in a tiny law firm with a screamer for a boss. We were now in job territory. Strictly a job. A very low paying job with no benefits.

I also wanted to be TV writer. With my then partner, Len Speaks, I had visited William Morris many times to see our agent, Andy. Saw Jack Lemmon in the elevator. Andy did not have the goods to be an agent. And our visits were purely academic exercises. Andy just wanted to show traffic in and out of his office. I heard he left that business. It wasn't his calling I guess. Me? I decided to move to California intoxicated, as my then boss pronounced, by palm trees and oranges. It was more the weather and the ridiculous idea of fame and fortune as a comedy writer. I'd pave the way, and Len would follow when we sold a script. Law was now a means to an end. I think I was still in job mode. And I wasn't writing any scripts. Setting up a household and making ends meet became pretty time consuming.

There is little reciprocity state to state, so my NY license was of no value in California. I had to take the Bar here. Which meant I had to have a job, so I could get an apartment, to pay for the fee for the Bar exam, so I found another small firm to be a secretary/law clerk while I studied and proved myself yet again to be worthy to be among the legal eagles of the sunshine state. The practice I found myself in, in California, like New York, was not what the hallowed halls of academe led one to believe in order to keep them in library books and new wings. I was an amusing anachronism to my skirt chasing, gambling boss who took any case in which money was paid up front. I got my license in California. (That's me at the Masonic Temple on Wilshire Boulevard where I was sworn in in 1983). He offered his guidance, "You're going to have to learn to stretch your ethics." Ah. This was even worse than the internship across from the Bronx County Courthouse a few years before, where my mentor had me place a bet at OTB. At this point, we are barely at "job", but it was paying the bills. And I was still hoping for that career as a writer. Of course, I was too tired to write when I got home from work after a day keeping the boss from losing the files and forgetting the clients. I learned a lot about what I would never do. I would never have a private practice.

With that realization and the long and winding road working for others, including one famous person, in his waning legal days, who called me the "paralegal" and had to be propped up, except when a camera was pointed in his direction, an ad brought me to my current role a a kind of prosecutor. In the 80s, career would have been too strong a word given what they were paying and the civil servant cache. But it was more than a job. And given my emotional and philosophical disposition, it was closer to a calling than I had expected would ever be my fate.

And, always it has remained, close to a calling, but never quite there, with intermittent frustration, rage, and disillusion at just how horrible people can be, I have stayed in this place for 23 years and counting. I am one of the lucky ones.

Still a lawyer.

Train Thoughts

Last night, I was sitting at this very desk, sweating with the still lingering spring heat in Los Angeles and making an entry on my companion blog, "Legacy of A Courtly Curmudgeon". A truck rumbled too fast up the narrow street outside. The sound sent me back to my little Bronx bedroom on any July or August summer evening, just after the sun had gone down and the sidewalks still radiated their day-long exposure. No computers then. I might have just shut off my portable record player. Could be 1966. It isn't just hot, but ponderously humid and we don't yet have such as "conditioned" air. We have the standard swooshing fan that just moves around the warm.

My bedroom looks down on a long yard, nothing more really than a back alley, and faces the back of the building on another street. Kids, lingering at play despite the calls to "come upstairs, shriek, in finishing a game of tag. My parents' TV is going in the living room, Saturday night, "Mission Impossible" is just starting with its characteristic Lalo Schifrin theme and the lighting of that fuse. I am crazy about Barbara Bain and Martin Landau, the really married couple who play colleagues and spies extraordinaire. I'll get out there in a minute. A man in that other building, I think it is one of the upper floors, is playing his violin. He plays it often and well, but the sound always makes me sad. I don't know why I think it is a man. I have never seen the musician, but only heard his song. A cat is yowling near the garbage cans. My father calls me, "Aren't you coming out to watch the show?" My mother and father like it too, not like the Monkees on Tuesday at 7:30. That they could do without.

And then, one more sound, about four blocks down towards Jerome Avenue, but still loud on a quieting day into night, the steady rumble/click/rumble of the El on its way to Woodlawn Station. I don't know why that sound is comforting. I have no place I want to go right now, except into the other room, where Rollin Hand is donning his latest disguise and Barney Collier is bypassing some phone lines. All those years ago.

Susan Boyle and "Church Ladies"

The linking of Susan Boyle, the amateur middle aged Scottish singing contestant, with the more pious among the churchgoing will become clear. I hope.

You may recall from the digital piece that has made its viral way through the net that when Ms. Boyle came out on the stage, the audience and one of the judges immediately snickered. The woman wasn't young. She wasn't stylish. She was arguably overweight, at least by television standards that add the proverbial 10 pounds. Her eyebrows presented in their pristine wildness. She was to the glitzy panel and the knowing audience, an obvious oddity. What could SHE possibly have to offer to the sophisticated world? As we now know, what she always had and gifted the scoffers who judged her visually peculiar, was a mystical voice. No longer could they justify the question of their first amused cognitive dissonance, "Surely this is a joke, for why would such a woman as she, be here?" She was there, because she could actually sing and because she honored her mother.

Things will happen for her now. What she will be in her new milieu, already post Larry King and the establishment of blogs in her honor, remains to be seen. But she put me in mind of other people who are dismissed out of hand, but don't have anything tangible to offer to provide them an entree into credibility in a world that fears the simple, or the pure. I count myself among those who try, but often fail to give them credibility. All they have to offer is their persistent and visible faith. And that offering makes the rest of us profoundly uncomfortable. With Ms. Boyle, there is the "Oh, isn't that wonderful, she can SING!" With those who praise God by say, going to the Monastery of the Angels after a Mass for a service in honor of Divine Mercy Sunday (brought to us by a young polish nun, Sr. Faustina, who had visions of Christ and wrote simply about her love of a Compassionate God), we are more inclined to think, "Isn't she just a little too pious?"

And, like myself today, off to Mirabelle to brunch, we go back to our secular world having had just enough spirituality, but not too much to make us stand out in any way, and have people look at us with a bemused smile of "She's just a religious nut." Someone I knew once said that anyone who made the sign of the Cross as he or she passed a Catholic Church was crazy. But, from her point of view, the signer was giving acknowledgment that inside that Church is our Holy of Holies, the Real Presence of Christ. Actually, this is my point of view too. I don't do what she does, not because I don't agree with her about Who is under that roof but mostly because I just never was trained to do it and never got into the habit. I do wonder though whether a little part of me fears being identified too much with my faith such that my own credibility as a college grad cum law degree and rational mind be endangered and it is more convenient to say I am not in the habit. Occasionally, I have been with priest friends who did grace before a meal in a restaurant and I was just a little bit nervous about being seen doing it, and making the sign of the Cross. I worry about looking, well, quaint. And I certainly don't do it when I go out with other friends. But like Susan Boyle willing to come out and be laughed at by the world, the Church ladies (and there are more and more young couples, male and female going in this direction) go out onto their small world stages and let the passersby or the customers or the thinkers, laugh uncomfortably.

I think the Church ladies may have the last laugh. And maybe it's time that I said grace when I had dinner with friends, out there, where everyone can see.

He is Risen, Alleluia!

It is amazing how readily we get into new habits, or out of old ones. I could have made an entry bright and early on Easter morn, but I had become nearly used to not blogging and so, I did not rush to it. I even considered that I would not continue at all.

But, here I am again!

I don't know if I'd call it a "good" Lent in terms of any spiritual growth. I "gave up" other things besides this blog. The grape, that is, vino, and spirits. Meat. And eating my favorite desserts. I was not perfect in my resolve on those very few occasions when I was somewhere where the menu had, for example, chicken or where a bottle of wine was especially purchased by another to celebrate. I chose, as one friend said, "charity over abstinence". I will admit that it wasn't hard to make that choice. But mostly, I stuck to my promise of restriction. It is not the giving up of something that is the object; it is a tool toward reflection on the sacrifice of the Lord and preparation for His (and ours in the fullness of time) Resurrection. The small giving up on our part should open the door to some giving to others, to cooperative action in the work of God. Did I achieve it? I don't know. I do know that the several services I attended and the words I heard and the Eucharist I received made me hope for my metanoia, for a true emptying of self. A beginning. Now if I only could restrict the anger that causes me to cuss with a reflexiveness that surprises me, as if I were not the person engaging in the offending (albeit often in the privacy of my car or room) act.

In other ways, the season was both dramatic and affecting. A woman I had come to know in my faith community was the victim of matricide. Her death and burial during this time of reflection on the ultimate death and burial of God made Man was a sad, yet profound experience. I had been reading a great deal about and of Flannery O'Connor and it somehow seemed like one of her stories, this stabbing death of a religious woman who tried to shield her children from evil only to have it come directly into her home in the guise of her schizophrenic youngest, likely in the throes of a psychotic break. O'Connor wrote about such grotesque denouements to highlight the potential of Grace amid how did she put it, "territory largely held by the devil." The day of her funeral was the anniversary of my father's death, a chilly, blue sky, puff cloud sunny day. We stood on a hill in the cemetery, at the later interment, each of us given a white rose from the painfully beautiful mahogany coffin that would soon be under ground, wind blowing amid prayer and profession of belief of what is promised beyond what we see through a glass darkly, the Church on earth and the Church in Heaven. I took that rose to the mausoleum where my father is interred and said a few words of remembrance there. I felt hopeful. And even happy.

And happier still as Good Friday gave way to Easter joy in remembrance that He is Risen.