Steve Dimick — Law 'n' Stuff

Musings,Thoughts, Ramblings, and The Occasional Great Idea

Archive for July, 2009

My friend, Chuck McLain

Jul 7

Posted by Steve in Chronological, Personal | No Comments

(P.S. to the marriage story)

The story of our marriage ceremony didn’t really do justice to Chuck, and newspaper obituaries are such fleeting things that I thought a little less transitory memorial was in order for the kindest, gentlest person I’ve known.

I’ll rush through the historical details so I can get to the good stuff.  

Chuck was an ordained Presbyterian minister, but for most of his career only served in an associate role at various churches.  His first love was social justice, which led him to his master’s in social work and a variety of positions with mental health counseling agencies and elder-care agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As the long-time executive director of San Leandro Community Counseling (a precursor to the successful Davis Street Foundation in San Leandro), where I first met him, he invented a novel way to leverage talent.  SLCC had been founded as a drug counseling agency during the 1960s, when Great Society and, later, Revenue Sharing money flowed freely.  A decade later, however, public funds began drying up and the agency began having trouble meeting its payroll.  At the same time, students pursuing a counseling degree were hard put to find someone to supervise them during the hundreds of hours of (unpaid) internship they were required to put in.

Chuck put the two problems together to form a solution.  A paid staff of five experienced counselors would oversee an intern staff of some twenty degree candidates who would do the actual counseling.  It was a four-to-one return on our money.

Chuck also marched with Cesar Chavez, was detained by the KBG for attempting to smuggle Bibles into the Soviet Union and worked extensively for the inclusion of LGBT clergy into the Presbyterian Church.

***

Enough bio.  Now for the stories.

At age 60, Chuck finally decided to come out as a gay man.  In typical Chuck fashion, he threw himself a birthday party, the invitation to which ran to two typewritten pages.  “I hope that none of my friends will think the less of me because I’m gay,” he wrote.  

At the party, I turned to a table-mate and quipped, “Ah, Chuck will do anything to get attention.  He’ll turn 60.  He’ll turn gay...”

To Chuck himself, I said (and I was not the only one), “Chuck, how goddamned stupid do you think we are?  Everybody knows and nobody cares.”

***

Chuck died about three weeks after performing his last wedding, for my step-daughter, Kristi.  At the reception, he told me he had booked a flight to France to see his friends there one last time.  “If I have to say goodbye to them, I want to do it in person,” he said.

But he came home weak and was almost immediately hospitalized.  He knew he was dying, and he called my office.  Damnit, I wasn’t there, but he spoke to Marianne and told her his plans.

“I think they’re going to let me go home tomorrow, and I want to have a potluck party for all of my close friends.  I know you’re going to miss me, and I want to tell everybody not to.  It’s going to be okay, and you shouldn’t spend any time grieving.”

Chuck died the next morning, his last thoughts having been for the welfare of his friends, and not for himself.

If I am reborn, I don’t want to come back as a white cow.  I want to come back as Chuck McLain.

Parental Support and Judicial Politics

Jul 6

Posted by Steve in Chronological, Tales From the Crypt | No Comments

(Pick your judges wisely)

Manoucher was retired from the Irani postal service, living on a tiny pension that was barely enough to feed himself on, let alone pay for medical care.  He did, however, have three strapping sons who had all emigrated to America.  The youngest worked at this and that, trying to support his wife and son; the middle one was an electrician making fair money, and the oldest had become a successful restaurateur.

The two oldest, being dutiful sons, hatched the idea that the youngest should fly to Dubai, drive to Tehran, finagle the old man out of Iran and bring him back to California.  Tom (Americanized name), the oldest, had it all figured out.  “He can spend a couple of months with me, a couple of months with Bob and a couple of months with Sean.  It won’t be a problem for anyone.”

It sounded like a great plan, except it didn’t even last for the first four months.  Dad was well into his 80s, spoke nothing but Farsi and the older brothers’ families didn’t really want him hanging around.  The grandkids spoke no Farsi, the old man was a very confused stranger in a strange land and the wives were embarrassed about the shabby-looking father-in-law.  All in all it was, to put it delicately, inconvenient.

Sean, the youngest, lived in an apartment with his wife and baby, and had no room for Dad.  Sean’s wife’s mother, however, had a mobile home and agreed to take in Manoucher.  When the relocation occurred, Tom and Bob stopped all contact with their father and refused to contribute to his support.  Sean was left begging doctors and dentists to treat Manoucher while contributing, as best he could, to the old man’s expenses for housing, food and clothing.

***

There is a little-noticed provision in the California Family Code (back then, a part of the Civil Code) that says “an adult child shall, to the extent of his or her ability, support a parent who is in need and unable to maintain himself or herself by work.”  Evidently, nobody paid much attention to this statute before Manoucher came my way, as I was able to find only a sprinkling of appellate cases interpreting it – and none dated within the last 30 years or so.  But I filed the action anyway.

***

It was slow going at first.  And then it got even slower.

When I filed the support action, the clerks had never heard of such a thing.  It didn’t fit within the parameters their computers could deal with.  So we summoned the supervisors, who were equally at a loss.  Good thing I had thought to bring a photocopy of the statute with me or nobody would have believed me at all.

It was finally decided to assign the case to a family law department, and I was given a hearing date.  On the date of the hearing, however, the judge decided it was not properly a family law case and ordered it transferred to the probate department.  Two months later, the probate judge ordered it transferred back to family law.  Back in the family law department, we are now probably four or five months into the process and I haven’t yet had a chance to make a single statement on the merits of my case.

***

We were finally able to go to trial, and Tom and Bob were ordered to pay monthly support for Manoucher.  But this was approximately two years later, so I’m getting ahead of myself.

***

This particular family law judge and I got off on the wrong foot in a couple of cases and I was left steaming.  What I dislike most about family law is its arbitrariness, its capriciousness, its results which depend on which judge you draw.  And this one shot from the hip.  She was sarcastic, caustic and acerbic and she would interrupt an attorney before he had hardly begun his argument because she KNEW what he was going to say and that it was going to be wrong.

And she was damned smart.

Over the next couple of years, I developed a great respect for this judge, and we learned to get along together.  I am second to none in my admiration of her intellect.  The problem was – and still is – that she isn’t quite as smart as she, herself, thinks she is.*

***

In the judge’s chambers during a settlement conference, she indicated that if this matter went to trial, she wouldn’t even consider ordering parental support if the parent were not a citizen of the United States.  (During the trial with this judge’s successor, I successfully showed that the law did not require the parent even to be a resident of the United States.)  She made it very clear how she felt about immigrants coming over here and abusing the system.

But Sean had another year or two before he could become a citizen and he had to become a citizen before he could sponsor Dad.  So I did what lawyers do best: I continued the case.  Again and again.

***

In Alameda County, at least, judges only have to sit in family law for a year or two before somebody with less seniority becomes a judge and gets stuck in family law.  The former family law judge, then, gets to go to downtown Oakland and do felony trials, which seems to be what all judges want to do, anyway.

So my judge moved up to felony trials (which wasn’t by far the end of her climb*); a new judge – obviously from a different political party – was assigned to her department; we went to trial; the hotshot San Francisco defense attorney stomped out of the courtroom when the trial was over; Tom and Bob were ordered to pay support to their father, the old man was able to get his new teeth and Sean finally got some relief.

Moral?  Our parents supported us.  Maybe not as well as we would have liked, but still.  And it’s not just a moral obligation, but a legal obligation, that we support them.  Think about it.

Moral II?  It ain’t what the law says, it’s the judge that you draw.

_____________________

*She’s now a justice on the California Supreme Court.  Neither her politics nor her sarcasm have changed, but she’s a little more circumspect in her written opinions and I don’t find myself disagreeing with too many of them.

MODEL CITY – Chapter 2

Jul 5

Posted by Steve in Chronological, Model City | No Comments

Leaving Oklahoma

Well you go through St. Louis,
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty

Bobby Troup, (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66

December, 1973

I gave a whoop as my U-Haul truck crossed the border from Oklahoma into the Texas Panhandle.  Oklahoma City looks even prettier in the rear-view mirror and here I come Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico.

It was less than a week before Christmas when I left Midwest City, driving Interstate 40 between Oklahoma and California for the third and final time, my whole life jammed into the truck, neatly at first and not-so-neatly toward the end.  What my wife and I couldn’t pack we sold at bargain prices.  Washer and dryer, $50.  Oldsmobile, $100.  We considered the sales a good deal for all concerned.

The two families muttered, made doom-filled predictions and found their only comfort in the fact that “the two of them have always been a little strange.”

“Shouldn’t you have a job lined up first?” my mother, Mildred, asked accusingly.  “Can’t you at least stay until after Christmas?  Aren’t you going to miss your little old gray-haired mother?”

No, no and no.

No, I’ll wash dishes in California if I have to.

No, there’s a storm predicted in a couple of days and the last thing I want is to be stuck in a snowstorm in Cline’s Corners, New Mexico, a hundred miles from anywhere and surrounded by Elvis paintings on velvet.

And no.  I won’t.

I didn’t say this last out loud.

*

We had saved for nearly three years, planning our escape, starting within six months of my triumphant arrival back in Midwest City after leaving the army.  Being entertainment editor of a minor daily newspaper in a minor town in a minor state wasn’t at all what I envisioned when I accepted the job.  Big fish, little pond and all that.

It was more like being a little fish in a mud puddle, struggling for breath.  It was more like going backward in time to the stifling mid-century that spawned me.  Probably because the town and state had never left mid-century.  And in my less generous moments I sometimes wondered just which century that would be.

So we eventually quit our jobs, bummed around Europe for three months, swooped into Midwest City, packed our things and were gone in less than a week.  And as we crossed each successive state line, running just ahead of the snowstorm that really did nearly trap us in Cline’s Corners, our whoops grew louder and more numerous.  Oklahoma to Texas: Whoop!  Texas to New Mexico: Whoop, WHOOP!  New Mexico to Arizona, Arizona to “Cal-i-for-nia, open your Golden Gate!”

We were determined to be free.  Free from the ‘50s and ‘60s.  Free from the cowboys and Indians and Oklahoma outlaws and the oil derrick on the Capitol lawn.  Free from the suspicion and the bigotry, the anti-intellectualism and the perennial suspicion of education.  Free from the iron rule of the fundamentalist churches’ self-appointed morality police, always sniffing around for sin.  Free from the parents who gave me life and then tried to suck it out of me.

Free, in short, of my entire past, which – if such a thing were at all possible – would have left a 26-year void and would not have produced a person sentient enough to try to escape it.

Ironic, I think now.  Isn’t “free” what my mother, brother and I thought we would be when we first moved to Midwest City 17 years earlier?

It hadn’t worked then, either.

But if “free” wasn’t the word we wanted as we followed thousands of Midwestern refugees along what had once been the great U.S. Highway 66 – Steinbeck’s “mother road” – if “free” wasn’t the word, what was?

MODEL CITY — Chapter 1

Jul 5

Posted by Steve in Chronological, Model City | No Comments

Rain

June, 2005

Standing in a sheltered doorway outside the Holiday Inn in Midwest City, I watch a thunderstorm building.  Almost continual lightning, first from the north, then the south, the west, the north again, the south again, the east finally and then a bright burst directly overhead, making the car alarms chirp.  Every third or fourth lightning flash is bright enough to blot out the street lights.  A real prairie storm.  It blusters and threatens for almost half an hour, trying to rain, but without success.  Then comes a tentative drop, another and another and now it rains as if to make up for lost time.

I miss thunderstorms.

Unlike the San Francisco Bay Area, where it pretty much rains from mid-fall to mid-spring and pretty much doesn’t the rest of the year, on the plains it rains intermittently all year long.  Usually not this much, I’m told: they got seven inches just last weekend, and the wheat harvest has been delayed until further notice.  The cutters should be in Kansas by now, but they haven’t even been able to start in Oklahoma.  The wheat is too wet to cut and that red clay is unforgiving when it’s soaked.  Their giant combines would bog down in no time.

In the Bay Area, we sometimes get a soaker of a rain, but it’s more usually day after day of drizzling.  In Oklahoma they get “gully washers,” or, as Carl Deen, who owned the quarterhorse I raced as a teenager, once commented, “It’s rainin’ like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock!”

Every ten years or so, the Bay Area might get a thunderstorm.  Scares the hell out of the natives.  The storms are so rare that they’re not a comfort to Californians, but a threat.  How, I ask my family and friends, can you be afraid of a thunderstorm when the lightning and thunder only come every two or three minutes?

You should see what a real thunderstorm is like.

*

In the last fifty years or so, Oklahoma farmers have adapted to irrigation, particularly for cotton –  if water is available locally, that is.  If it isn’t, they still practice dry farming, which works pretty well in wet years and not so well in the dry ones.  When you fly across middle America and see the square farm plots, each with a perfect circle of green inside the square, that’s irrigation.

(There are also the aluminum pipes on giant wheels that can be rolled across a field and the light-weight, three-inch, snap-together pipes in twenty-foot sections that have to be hand-carried from row to row.  These make green squares rather than circles, using the land more efficiently, but requiring more labor.)

The old-time farmers didn’t believe in irrigation.

Rain makes the crops grow, and we get plenty of rain in Oklahoma.

In a good year.

If we’re lucky.

Mr. Dailey, a farmer’s son and retired butcher, who lived across the street from me during my last stay in Midwest City, grew tomatoes in his back yard, but wouldn’t water them from a garden hose.  “Tomatoes don’t like city water,” he explained.  “Makes ‘em taste funny.”  In a dry spell, he had no tomatoes, the same as his father before him.

*

This week in Oklahoma has been full of thunderstorms, but on average, few Oklahoma rainstorms are thunderstorms.  Mostly they’re just rain.

My second favorite type is the lazy summer rain, coming from (I believe) a single cloud, with the personality and all the energy of Eeyore: “I’m sooo tired.”  The drops are huge and widely spaced, as if breaking up into regular-sized raindrops would be too much effort.  This is a storm in no particular hurry, producing not all that much water before it mopes on along.

My brother and I once ran laughing down Grandma Collins’ street in Guthrie just ahead of one of these lazy rains.  It was raining only half a block behind us, and moving in our direction, but not fast enough to catch us until we stopped and let it.

Despite myself and all my efforts to forget, some things I do miss, after all.

The Audacity of Chickens

Jul 5

Posted by Steve in Chronological, Just for Kicks | No Comments

Another web post circulating about concerned “Why did the chicken cross the road?’  Not to be outdone, our smart-ass group chimed in as follows:

UNATTRIBUTED: The chicken crossed the road to show the possum that it could be done.

JOHN MC CAIN:  My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to bomb the other side of the road.

MARTIN LUTHER KING:  Because it had a DREAM...that ALL God's chickens...red, yellow, black,
white and brown...could cross the road.

GEORGE H.W. BUSH:  Read my lips.  No new chicken riddles.

GEORGE W. BUSH:  He wanted to unificate with other chickens so he could put food on his
family.

JOHN MADDEN:  LOOK AT THAT CHICKEN CROSSING THAT ROAD!!!!  THAT CHICKEN CAME HERE TODAY TO RUN!!!!

OSAMA BIN LADEN:  To force his decadent Western ways on the Muslim world, peace be upon it.

LLOYD BENSON:  I knew that chicken, and *you,* senator, are no chicken.

DAN QUAYLE:  I like my chicken with a baked potatoe...pottato...a nice spud.

SPIRO AGNEW:  Cowardly, craven chickens cross to create chaos.

MARCEL MARCEAU:  "                      "

VOLTAIRE:  I disapprove of chickens crossing the road, but I will defend to the death their right to do so.

MISTER ROGERS:  Can you see the chicken cross the road?  Gee, I like it when chickens cross the road.

FIRST-GRADE READER:  See the road.  See the hen cross the road.  Run, hen, run.

CALIFORNIA HIGHSCHOOL GRADUATE:  Cuz he, like, wanned 2, y'know, get overr their.

LARRY ELLISON:  I'm buying that chicken.  Hell, I'm buying the whole damned Interstate Highway System.

YODA:  Look inside yourself, you should, if seek you to know why crossing the
road the chicken was.

RICK BLAINE:  Louie, I think this is going to be the beginning of a beautiful dinner.

CASPAR GUTTMAN:  My dear sir, if you lose a chicken you can always get another one.  But
there's only one Maltese Falcon.

GILBERT AND SULLIVAN:  In matters that are fowlish-like there's none so anguished-howlish-like
As pullets dodging bullets getting struck by speeding motorbikes.

There’s a Principal Here…

Jul 5

Posted by Steve in Chronological, Just for Kicks | No Comments

I belong to a Yahoo group of smart-asses.  A while back, there was an e-mail circulating around called “There’s a principal here without any principles.”  So we tackled it and produced the following:

The baby gurgled like a toilet does after the Liquid Plumber has sat in it for half an hour.

Her mouth made that little kissy-kissy sound, like the kitchen drain when the last water is swirling down it.

“Floorboard it!” Ringo shouted to the other mounted desperados as he leaped onto his horse.

She loved him like George Bush loves malapropisms.

It was a perfect likeness, she thought of the quick sketch she had just traced in the wet sand, and the next wave would wipe it as clean and
featureless as had the acid she had tossed into his smirking face.

“Flaccid,” he half-screamed, half-yelped, as his manliness shrunk to the size of a half-eaten Tootsie Roll, “who the hell you callin’ flaccid?”

“I love you more than the stars in the sky,” he breathed, not noticing his pocket protector harshly rubbing against her breast, “or, at least, the ones you can see in the Nevada desert; more than the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or, at least, where it was in September 2007; more
than the decimal places of pi, and I mean the current number, dearest – not the puny five million from six months ago.” “Oh, Ambrose,” she breathed between smacks and pops of her chewing gum, “and I love you more than all the jelly beans in the big jar in the window of Katz’s
Drug Store.”

He stood out like a sore thumb; actually more like a pair of sore thumbs.

He was an intellectual giant, big and stupid.

He realized what he'd done and tried to cover it up, like a cat in a sandbox.

His interest in her was as blatantly obvious as that of a rude Dalmatian.

The fields seemed to go on forever, like aunt Martha's stories about how everything she did when she was little was either much harder or
much better than what we do.

When she walked, her body movement was captivating, like Jell-O on a jackhammer.

He knew he loved her, just like he knew the Cowboys were going to win on Sunday.

Her hair flowed rich and smooth over her shoulders, like soft ice cream out of the spigot at Dairy Queen.

He had muscles like Popeye -- well not exactly like Popeye, who was actually kinda funny looking, but more like Popeye would have looked
if he didn't look so funny.

Her fears had been so bottled up inside and weighed so heavily that when she learned she was off the hook, she felt both relieved and
drained, like a cow that's just been milked.

Methammaticks was reely hard, liek spelinng.

She was long, lean and aerodynamic, with those Italian-styled lines like a Masseratti or a Lamborghini, but when she spoke it sounded like a VW
going 40 in first gear.

He bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus, or at least like a six-year-old boy standing in his sandbox over his plastic Army men.

My grandfather is the wisest person I know: wiser than the entire cast of Saturday Night Live, if you can believe that.

My dad said General Patton could have gone through Iraq like foie gras through a goose.

She thought he looked as healthy and manly as the Ken doll she had only recently packed away into the closet, except for being anatomically correct.

“Take me, you fool! Take me,” she shouted, sounding as desperate as a vowel would on “Wheel of Fortune” if vowels could shout.

Frodo stared at the Crack of Doom with disgusted but rapt fascination, like he had stared at Sam Gamgee’s butt crack that morning on the Mangy
Moors when Sam’s trousers sagged like a bag of moldy potatoes trying to rid itself of its contents.

He had a seriously inflated ego, inflated like your intestines get after an evening of especially good beans and wienies.

He felt thoroughly out of place, like a retard at a Mensa gathering.

Her hair was tangled and dirty, like spaghetti...and meatballs.

It had been suggested that he had a spare tire, but nobody mentioned the degree to which it had been overinflated.

He thought it best to make his exit, quietly, inconspicuously, and nonchalantly, like a squirrel in the street confronted by a rapidly
approaching Buick Roadmaster.

On 9/11 (to be updated eventually)

Jul 5

Posted by Steve in Chronological, Ramblings & Stories | No Comments

(Squandering America’s political coin.)

(On September 11, 2001, my wife and I were touring Burgundy and stopped for a drink in the little town of Nuit-St.-Georges, which gives its name to certain regional Burgundian wines.  Three years later, while working a Chamber of Commerce festival in Castro Valley, I came home at noontime to ease my weary back for an hour, but was quite bothered by the import of the anniversary.  I sat down and wrote the following piece.)

Happy Anniversary to all of my friends who plan to vote for the incumbent in the upcoming presidential election.

I was in France on September 11, 2001.  We were sitting in a sidewalk café in a little town in Burgundy.  I went inside to use the bathroom and when I came out, I noticed the television showing one of the World Trade Center towers smoldering.  I watched for a few moments, not understanding what was going on.  Then I rushed outside and told my wife, “Get your purse and your camera and come in here quick.  They’ve bombed the World Trade Center again.”  Only they hadn’t bombed it again – it was much worse than that.

Over the next hour, we watched the second plane hit the second tower and the chaos that followed.  The bartender changed the television channel to American CNN for us.  The proprietress brought us free snacks.  We finally tore ourselves away from the television and wandered through a few shops, where the French shopkeepers were as somber and shocked as we were.  That day, Americans were welcomed everywhere, with tears and sympathy and brotherhood.

The banner headline on the front page of Paris’ largest daily newspaper the next day read “WE ARE ALL AMERICANS.”

Two days later, back at our hosts’ house outside of Paris, the father of one of our former exchange students called to tell us how sorry he was for our loss and how much he empathized with America.

Eighteen months later, the United States invaded Iraq, which had no connection whatsoever with Al Qaeda.  Based on misinformation, many honorable senators voted for the invasion, as did every single member of the House of Representatives except one.

Almost all of the rest of the world condemned this invasion.  And what was our answer?  “The rest of the world is wrong.  We’ll stop eating French fries.  We’ll stop eating German sausages.  We’ll stop eating Belgian waffles.  After all, if you’re not for us, you’re against us.”

“We bailed the French out in World War II, and now look how they’re treating us.”

That sounds to me like saying to your best friend, “I gave you a place to stay when you lost your job.  And now you won’t loan me your spare bedroom so I can cheat on my wife?  How ungrateful can you get?!”

In other words, the world doesn’t hate America.  They hate what we’re doing.  “Love the sinner and hate the sin.”  My French friends don’t condemn America; they condemn Mr. Bush.  One of them pointed out to me that more Americans are opposed to the invasion of Iraq than the entire population of France.  So how does that make the French so evil?

On September 11, 2001, the United States gained more sympathy and friendship coin than it seemed possible we could ever spend.  In the three years since, we’ve tossed those coins down the gutter and our sympathy and friendship bank is flat broke.  Thank you Mr. Bush.

On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda was a highly effective, but SMALL organization of hard-core Islamists carrying out a terrorist attack once a year or so.  In the three years since, Al Qaeda has only grown stronger.  More importantly, it has splintered.  Chop off one of the Hydra’s heads, and it grows nine more. More importantly still, the Islamic world now perceives the United States as a grave threat to their religion and to their way of life.  (It doesn’t matter whether or not this is true.  We have to deal with their perceptions, and we’re not.)  Thank you Mr. Bush.

On September 11, 2001, almost all of the effective Islamic terrorists were Saudis.  Today, they come from all over the Islamic world to train to fight “the great infidel.”   Thank you Mr. Bush.  You promised to be a uniter, not a divider, and you’ve certainly united the Islamic fundamentalists.

(And, by the way, Mr. Bush, they do not “hate us for our freedom.”  That’s just cheap political clap-trap.  They hate us for what we’re doing.  The world envies us for our freedom.  That used to be our major strength.  We led by example.  Now we’re attempting to lead by force.  In the long run, that policy has never worked and it’s not working now.)

Are you safer now than you were four years ago?  Not by a long shot.  You are in much more danger thanks to our foreign policies.  Is the world a safer place than it was four years ago?  Not by a long shot.  What American or Australian hotel or embassy anywhere in the world has proved to be safe for you to visit?  Does our country enjoy the respect and esteem that it did four years ago?…Is there really a need to answer that question?

Is our economy in better shape than four years ago?  Not by a long shot.  We can’t blame Mr. Bush for the dot-com burst and subsequent stock-market crash, but we can blame him for massive federal deficits due to tax cuts and the Iraqi invasion.  The effects of these deficits will show up soon on your adjustable mortgage loan payments and your charge card payments. You haven’t felt them yet?  You will.

And finally, we have to admit that we’re stuck with Iraq.  It doesn’t matter which Democratic candidate became the nominee, whether Kerry or Edwards or Kuchinic or Sharpton or Dean or whoever.  We created the mess and we’re stuck with it.

So, I hear you saying, if the Republican and Democratic foreign policies vis-a-vis Iraq are almost identical, why change horses?

It might be because the first horse deliberately threw you into the quicksand, and you’re stuck there in the quicksand in the middle of the stream.  Do you want to trust that same horse to get you out?  Or is changing horses in mid-stream the more sensible alternative?

Le Mariage

Jul 2

Posted by Steve in Chronological, Personal | No Comments

(How we were tossed out of Notre Dame cathedral and into the snow.)

When we decided to get married, I knew there was only one person to perform the ceremony.  My long-time friend Chuck, a social services administrator who was also an ordained Presbyterian minister, had married most of his large circle of friends, and almost all of their children.  There was no question: only Chuck would do.

Chuck would be happy to perform the marriage.  Just name the date.  Anytime other than the last three weeks in February, when he would be skiing in France.  Unless, of course, we wanted to join him in France and be married there…

How can you turn down an offer like that?  To be married in Paris!  We projected the cost and determined that to fly to Paris and stay for ten days would probably cost less than what we would spend on the entire production here:  renting a site, inviting all the friends,  relatives, in-laws and ex-in-laws, and providing dinners, Champagne and lodgings for dozens of people.

So it would be Paris.  But when?  Chuck was going skiing in the French Alps and would be in Paris only on February 13, 14 and 15.  Stupidly (not realizing the impossibility of obtaining dinner reservations at a decent restaurant on February 14), I told him, “Hey: there’s no question.  If those are our only choices, it has to be Valentine’s Day.”

The next question was where to do the ceremony.  I  hadn’t been to Europe in years, but I had spent several weeks in Paris on a couple of occasions.  I knew the centre ville.  There is a little park right on the point of the Isle de la Cité where I used to dangle my legs over the rock parapet late at night after dinner and toss my cigarettes into the Seine to see whether they would flow to the left or the right, and, being alone, look jealously at the Parisian lovers alongside me and above me on the quais.  There are the Luxembourg Gardens, where a starving Hemingway claimed to catch pigeons for dinner when the police weren’t looking.

Both were ideal locations–in the summer or fall.  But in February there are no flowers in the Luxembourg Gardens, the city’s fountains are frozen solid and the chill factor on the point of Cité approaches 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

My indoor location preferences were Ste. Chapelle, a marvellous little jewel-box chapel from the 13th Century, St. Severin, an ancient stone church directly across the Seine from Notre Dame, with modern, abstract, stained-glass windows, and, of course, Notre Dame de Paris.

Chuck’s Parisian friends Georges and Christine (who were to be the witnesses at our wedding), started calling around.  They couldn’t reach St. Severin.  Ste. Chapelle reported that we could have the wedding there, but they wouldn’t close the chapel for us.  We would have to put up with tourists and their cameras.  But the priest who answered the phone at Notre Dame gave us the green light.

Unfortunately, Christine forgot to ask his name.

The six of us showed up at Notre Dame at 7:00 p.m.: Marianne, my soon-to-be-step-daughter Kristi, myself, Chuck, Georges and Christine.  Marianne had a bouquet of roses courtesy of Christine.  We took pictures outside the cathedral: Chuck, Kristi, Marianne and her roses, and me.

Inside the cathedral, Chuck looked for an empty side chapel.  He found one which held a floor lamp.  He opened the wrought-iron gate, the rest of us filed in, and Chuck began the ceremony.  As I remember, he had reached the point at which he said, “Kristin has written something special she would like to read at this joyous occasion.”  And then the troubles began.

Someone on the other side of the wrought-iron gate complained.  A crowd gathered.  This was a sacrilege and we shouldn’t be here.  Chuck, who stood about six-foot-four, but who was* generally the most accommodating of persons, summoned up his deepest voice to intone, “This is a solemn occasion.  Would you please leave us in peace?  We won’t be long.”

Someone in the crowd summoned a church official, who arrived accompanied by a pair of Notre Dame policemen.  Who would imagine that a cathedral would have its own police force?  This is highly unusual, the official kept repeating.  Highly unusual.

Chuck was arguing that such a sacred rite was not sacrilegious to the cathedral.

Marianne was making that groaning noise that means, “how did I let myself get into this?”

Kristi was rolling her eyes as only a ten-year-old girl can.

Christine, who should have been explaining that she had obtained permission, was silent, hiding behind her husband.

I was thinking, just skip the ceremony, Chuck.  Say the pronouncement and let’s get out of here.

“I have many friends in the reformed churches,” the official was saying.  “I would never try to perform a Catholic ceremony in one of their churches.  This is highly unusual.  Highly unusual.”

With Chuck unwilling to give up the personalized ceremony he had written and the church official equally determined to prevent the ceremony from proceeding, it soon became obvious that we would not be married in Notre Dame.  We were unceremoniously escorted out.  Chuck later had his ceremony back in our apartment, where the wedding music playing on the radio was from Bizet’s Carmen:  “If you don’t love me, I love you.  And if I love you, watch out!”

People say to us, “You were married in Paris?  On Valentine’s Day?  How romantic!”

Marianne makes that same little groaning noise.  Kristi, now almost 30, rolls her eyes.  I say, “Well…there’s a story goes with that.”

__________

* Chuck died of pancreatic cancer in 2005.  Just like Chuck, who always looked 20 years younger than his real age,  he lost not a single hair during his chemotherapy.  He had performed more than 400 marriage ceremonies during his long career (he didn’t start counting until he’d been at it for several years, and so could never give an exact count.)  His very last ceremony was for my beautiful step-daughter, Kristi.  I cried all the way through his memorial service.  Requiescat in pace, my great and good friend.


Joe Ferreira’s Estate

Jul 2

Posted by Steve in Chronological, Law in General | 2 Comments

(I don’t need no steenking will.)

Some people just don’t need a will.  But some people definitely do need a will, as illustrated by the probate I did some years ago for Joe Ferreira (not his real name.)

Despite the popular misconception that “If I don’t have a will, when I die the State of California will take all of my assets,” the California Probate Code tries its best to make sure that the property of persons who die intestate (without a will) goes to the beneficiaries they probably would have chosen themselves.

For the most part, if I die without a will, my property will go to my spouse.  If I am not married, it will go to my children.  If I have no children, it will go to the descendants of my parents (my siblings and/or nieces and nephews.)  If there are none of those, it will go to the descendants of my grandparents.  And that’s where the tricky part comes in.

Joe was from an extended Portuguese family, but he was an only child and he never married.  Therefore, his estate would go to the descendants of his grandparents.  He left a fair-sized estate and one of his relatives petitioned the court to be appointed his administrator.  The first problem was that after so many generations, nobody in the family had a complete family tree.  It took my client two or three months of sleuthing to get the names and addresses of all those entitled to inherit from Joe.

Joe’s maternal grandparents had six children, including Joe’s mother.  All of those children were deceased, but each of them left between one and six children of their own and some of those children had died leaving children in return.  Ditto for his paternal grandparents, who had seven children, including Joe’s father.  My client had to start writing and telephoning all of his cousins, who then wrote and telephoned all of their cousins and living aunts and uncles until a complete family tree was finally compiled.

So Joe’s estate was initially divided into 11 parts (for his mother’s five siblings and his father’s six siblings.)  But none of those 11 people were still around.

One of them had died leaving two children still living, so each of them received 1/22 of the estate.

Another left one child still living (1/22) and one child now deceased, who left four children of his own (1/88 each.)

Another had three children (all deceased, but 1/33 for each line), one of whom had three children of her own (1/99 each), but one of those had died leaving two living children (1/198 each.)

Are our heads spinning yet?

When the dust settled, some of Joe’s relatives received several thousand dollars and some of them received only a few hundred dollars.  Difficult as it was, the distribution of Joe’s estate was fair.  The problem was that nobody in the family believed Joe would have wanted this result.

So if I am unmarried with three children and die without a will, my estate will go equally to my three children.  That’s probably what I would have wanted, anyway.  I may not need a will.

Joe, however, needed a will.

Former Adversaries

Jul 2

Posted by Steve in Chronological, Fun Times | No Comments

I will fight if I have to.  It’s part of the job.  But I fight calmly.  Many another attorney has lectured me – or even yelled at me.  Or lectured my client during a four-way meeting.  I don’t lecture back.  I don’t yell back.  I lay out my position as calmly as I am able under the circumstances.  If that doesn’t work, I shrug my shoulders and say “we’ll let the judge decide.”  (I do, however, tend to get a bit sarcastic in my briefs for the judge.)

I would much prefer to look upon litigation – particularly family law litigation – not as a battle, but as a problem to be solved.  I think that’s why so many litigants whom I have opposed have later come to me for representation.

Several years ago, another attorney and I had a case in front of Judge Gordon Baranco when he was sitting in family law.  He called the two of us up to the bench and said, “I’m glad you two are on this case.  It looks like it could get really nasty, but I know you won’t let that happen.”

Probably not a year goes by that I don’t get a call from a husband or wife whom I opposed in a dissolution action some years back, asking if I would represent him/her in a new matter.  “You were so fair and so calm – unlike my attorney – that I want you to represent me now,” is the usual refrain.

***

Many of my clients also become life-long friends.  Until she died, an elderly Portuguese client would bring me homemade wine every Christmas.  Another one brought home-baked cookies, and another one homemade chocolate treats.  Louie, an elderly Chinese client, always brought sprigs of magnolia blossoms.  They were beautiful and smelled wonderful for about five minutes, and Louie never knew that we had to toss them outside into the garbage can almost as soon as he left because the scent was so overpowering.

***

My favorite story about former adversaries also involves a grateful tip of the hat to a now- retired family law attorney.

Louie’s daughter asked me to represent her in her divorce.  Prior to her marriage, she had owned a house in her own name, but she had placed it in joint tenancy with her husband out of love and trust.  This all occurred prior to 1994, when the law was different from today, and it was legally assumed that her house was half his.  And – unlike today – there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

Husband’s attorney was the most renowned and respected female attorney of her day in Alameda County, a lady who played strictly by the book and who seldom gave a sucker a break.  Most attorneys liked her and respected her, but nobody underestimated her toughness.  But when the four of us met during the obligatory “four-way conference,” she told Husband he really should give up his interest in Wife’s generous pension plan.  Although he was greedy enough to demand that his wife pay him for the half-interest in the house which she had given to him in the first place, he agreed to let her keep her entire pension, which pretty much evened things out.  It was a fair settlement, morally, even if I could not have gotten the same result following a trial.  My high admiration for his attorney rose even higher.

***
About two years later, Husband’s brother asked me to represent him in a divorce.  Husband had recommended me.

Statistical data collected by Statpress SEOlution (blogcraft).