Our Writing

I did wills and small estates for forty-one years. The office was above a shoe shop on Market Street, second floor, and the radiator banged so loud in January that clients used to ask if someone was knocking. I kept a coffee can of pencils on the desk. People expect a lawyer to have a fountain pen. I used a yellow Dixon Ticonderoga and chewed the ends.

My first case I lost. A man wanted to keep a fence his neighbor said was three feet over the line. It was three feet over the line. I argued it anyway because he had already paid me twenty dollars and I felt I owed him something. The judge was a woman named Ruth Feldman who later sent me clients for years. She told me afterward in the hall that I had been wrong but I had been clear about it. I went home and my wife asked how it went and I said fine.

I never billed by the six-minute increment the way the city firms did. I would give people a number and stick to it. Sometimes that number was a casserole. Mrs. Petrowski did my taxes one year in exchange for her late husband's probate. The casserole was tuna.

I taught fourth grade at Lincoln Elementary, the same room, 14, for twenty-six years. The east wall got the morning sun and by ten the kids on that side were squinting, so I would swap the rows every September and forget by October. We had a class hamster called Buttons who got out twice. The second time the janitor found him in the boiler room and that was the end of Buttons.

The thing nobody tells you is how much of it is just keeping forty pencils sharpened. I had a hand crank sharpener bolted to the windowsill that a boy named Dennis Kowalczyk broke in 1981 by feeding it a crayon. I never replaced it properly. The new one was electric and jammed. And the mimeograph, that purple ink, the kids would put the page up to their face and breathe it in before I could stop them.

I remember the snow day in February of 1978 when they closed the schools but the call went out late, so half my class was already there. We made paper snowflakes and I read them most of a book about a boy and a fox. The heat was on too high. One girl, Theresa, fell asleep on her arm and left a red mark on her cheek shaped like the seam of her sleeve. Her mother came at noon in boots and we all went home.

I was a supply officer, which means I spent the Cold War counting things. Bolts, flour, blankets, fuel. People hear navy and think battles. I think of a clipboard and a flashlight at two in the morning in a hold that smelled like diesel and old paint. We were out of the Norfolk yard mostly. My bunk was under a pipe that dripped one drop every nine seconds and I counted it more nights than I will admit.

There was a chief named Garrett who could requisition anything. Need eggs, he had eggs. We ran short on coffee once off the coast of Spain and he came back from shore with forty pounds of it and a parrot. The parrot did not last. The captain was not a parrot man.

I got seasick the first six weeks and then never again, which is the one nautical thing I am proud of. My daughter asks if I saw the world. I saw a lot of ports at night and the inside of a lot of warehouses. Naples was the one I liked. The pizza there was thin and they charged you for the table.