Update: This essay won second place in the 2009 Florida Writers Association Royal Palm Literary Awards competition for Creative Nonfiction. The author, aka Mary Wagner, also won an award for her autobiography.
“May it please the court.” The words are enough to strike terror into the hearts of most attorneys I know. They are the first words you speak when you address the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an oral argument. The words are ritual, as standardized and formulaic as Kabuki theater. And I was about to say them myself…if I just didn’t faint.
I have a framed photo on my desk at work It dates from perhaps a year before I started law school at the age of forty, and only a few months before I would break my back in a riding accident, spend three painful months in a body cast, and have the world as I knew it divide into “before” and “after.”
In the photo, I’m standing in a winter woods, with my four children gathered around me. They range, in that picture, from about three years old to thirteen. We are surrounded by pristine snow and bare trees, and framed in a pretty fieldstone archway. I am beaming, and my entire universe revolves around keeping them safe and warm and out of harm’s way. If you had walked up to me then and told me that in just a few short years I would not only be a criminal prosecutor but find myself arguing cases before the state supreme court, I would have given you the same stare as if you’d told me a genealogical search had just revealed that I was really the Queen of England, and a Lear jet was standing by to whisk me back across the pond. Oh, and the roof at Buckingham Palace needs fixing.
I might have smiled pleasantly, rolled my eyes…and then called the police.
But fate—and a tall horse who steered like a barge—intervened, and barely a year after I was lifted off the sandy soil of a riding arena on a back board, my youngest son started part-time kindergarten and his mother started law school as one of the first part-time students enrolled at Marquette University Law School. I remember sitting in a large classroom during orientation week, surrounded by dozens of twentysomethings young enough to be my children. An affable professor at the front of the room was demonstrating the Socratic method of teaching with an exercise that kicked off with the question, “who owns the moon?” I didn’t really care about the moon right then, but as he spoke I felt an oppressive cloud of pessimism descend on me like a starless night.
