Mentor

Nearly ten years ago, I started supervising the law clerks in my unit. I'm still in touch with many of the clerks, I think of them as "my" clerks, although they worked for the entire unit. Today I was talking with one who worked for me the first year I was supervising. He has various claims about my supervising. First, he claims that I said my standards were as follows: Show up on time, don't be drunk. I view this as a slight exaggeration. Second, he says that the first day he arrived, I told him I was glad he was there and to draft a motion in limine. Which was fine with him, except he didn't know what a motion in limine was.

He survived working with us during the first jury trial the unit had done in many years. Now he is a very important person in state government, and I have enjoyed watching him rise over the past ten years. He says I am his mentor. I think that is, once again, an exaggeration, for he was going to do well no matter what. I truly believe that. There are people you can drop to the bottom of the well, and they will be just fine. He is one of those people, but I enjoy the flattery nonetheless, and enjoy keeping up with him, and putting in my two cents whenever he is contemplating a change.

The first in his family to go to college, I'd like to see him consider the bench, but he has spent more and more of his time in administration. All of which is a rambling way of saying that I miss supervising law clerks, miss their youth and enthusiasm for the law, and wish that I could have some around on a regular basis again.

Guardianship Cases

Over time, lawyers develop specialties in their practice, and sometimes go for long periods doing only one sort of case. For some reason, for the last couple of years, my pro bono cases have all been guardianship cases. I like them fine, I guess. I try to focus very hard on getting everybody possible on board before I file an action to commence a guardianship, so that the needs of the ward are met, and the family is in agreement. When I can't get agreement from everybody, and sometimes you just can't, I try to be sure I'm on the right side of the argument. This process is particularly difficult when dealing with end of life issues for the parent of a disabled person.
I think it's often frustrating for siblings to come to terms with the fact that one of their number has special needs, and is going to get a special estate deal, and that deal might be better than their deal. Sort of the "Mom always liked you best" problem.
For the parents, it's not that they always liked "you" best, but that "you" needed them more, and will have greater needs after they die. But it doesn't mean the siblings have to like it, or be particularly happy about having to provide the moral and possibly economic and guardianship support to their sibling that their parents have provided. But they generally do it, often with extraordinary care and grace, sometimes grudgingly, but only occasionally not at all.

Chinese is Easy, Just like English

So says my Chinese instructor, anyway. He is teaching 8 adult students, there are two in their twenties, and two in their fifties and the rest of us are somewhere in between. The class is two hours long on Sunday afternoons. Mid-way through the class we take a ten minute break and do tai-chi. Because Chinese is a tonal language, and tai-chi has the same discipline of movement as ballet, I call it my singing and dancing class.

To say it is hard is an understatement. I feel ridiculous, knowing my Chinese is virtually incomprehensible to a native speaker. My writing is like a pre-schooler's. But the teacher, Mr. Li, is endlessly encouraging to all of us, and tells us that people in China will be pleased that we can say anything at all. Which is probably true, but I wish . . . well, some things are best done by the next generation. I went to school with plenty of kids whose parents had accents.

I have been so impressed with Mr. Li as a teacher that I have resolved to try to be as good a teacher of English as he is of Chinese. He comes to class carefully prepared, he has spoken with a friend who teaches Chinese at Georgia Tech and uses some materials from him, some materials he's gathered himself and a children's text book. He encourages us, corrects us sincerely, and is enthusiastic about our efforts.

This week we have homework of copying out a dialogue and studying the coming lesson. We also have to prepare to take dictation for body parts. In English, they pretend that you have phonetic rules for spelling, which are mostly notable for exceptions. In Chinese, they don't even waste time with that, and just tell you to memorize the pictogram for each word. So all I have to do is memorize 2000-3000 words and I can read a newspaper.

Going to London

We're leaving for London next week and Jim and I are very excited. James, who is 7, seems less enthralled, because the change of location means that there will not be a tree or lots of presents, which seems to him to be the whole point of Christmas. But I'm very happy to be going, because I want to walk around in the cold, and look at the museums, and shop in the stores, and eat a lot of Stilton cheese, and visit my cousin's family and have a really good time.

Lost

I got 28.1% of the vote, Ron Flury got 38.9, and John Newton got 32.8. Due to a technical problem, complete results weren't in before I went to bed, but I went to bed knowing that I had less than 28%, and about half the people had voted. I had said to a guy I work with that I would feel like I'd made a respectable showing with 28%, and that's what I got. About 54,000 people voted.

I have to spend a lot of the next couple of days getting signs down, and then I'll go back to work. It's a trifle anti-climactic, but I will say the idea of having to raise money to be competitive in a full election was less than attractive. It was good, too, to have Jim and James to go home with at the end of the evening. I would have been hard to go home alone.

Voted for Myself

Actually, it was a bit weird, standing there in the voting booth looking at my name. It felt almost unladylike to vote for myself, but I did. When I walked into the polling station, which is the same one I've been going to since we moved to this house nine years ago, I happened to be aquainted with the poll worker standing at the door, who felt compelled to announce loudly that I was a candidate for county court judge, and everybody in the room looked up and I was really embarrassed, even though I know as a candidate I'm supposed to be really happy.

While I was standing in line to get a sandwich at lunch, a woman I never saw before told me she'd voted for me. That was cool.

Election Day

We've done what we can do, organized as well as we could, and Jim and I have no regrets. How do I feel? Okay. I feel okay, a little bit at loose ends, but okay. I'm happy I did it. Last night we entertained ourselves looking up how much my opponents had spent on the primary, each raised over $90k and spent about the same. Remarkable, I think, for a County Court Judge race. You would think for that kind of money people would have a real sense of what County Judges do, and what you look for in a judge, but the analysis has been truly superficial, and I suspect that even today a majority of voters will appear at the polls knowing little about the candidates.

The Supervisor of Elections here in Leon County is predicting higher than average turnout for today. We'll see. Several people have told me that low voter turnout would help me, but I don't know. I just don't know.

This morning I got a tiny bit of free publicity from NPR when they did a short piece on sign waving, and they had a quote from Terry Madigan, who gave tips for successful sign waving, and closed with a nice quote from me about name recognition in down the ballot races. And they said my name and what I was running for and everything.

Another person came and stood by the side of the road supporting another candidate and said she'd seen my flyer in the newspaper this morning and that she was going to vote for me.

Staging Day

Today we'll go around and gather up everything we need for tomorrow and get it where it needs to go, from signs and water for the sign wavers to food for the party after the polls close. We'll call everyone who is participating and confirm with them by phone tonight, and generally hope for the best.

I'd like to say I'm calm and cautiously optimistic, but I'm slightly sick at my stomach and wishing the day of reckoning was not upon us. My webmaster, Ted, is always talking about the book I'll write after this is over. What will we call it, "The Working Mother's Guide to Running for Office"? Considering that out of 27 local candidates, only 4 are women and of those only I have a child at home, it's going to be a narrow audience.

So, do you like princesses?

Yesterday while we were standing at the Courthouse waving signs, somebody else brought along a little kid, a five year old girl. She was sort of standing around with us. James, who had retired from campaigning, started showing her his game boy, and I heard him say to her, "So, do you like princesses?"

I just thought that was the nicest thing. I don't believe I have ever previously heard the word princess uttered by my son. He asked that little girl if she liked princesses because he knew that was something she might be interested in and something she might like to talk about, it was not anything he was interested in. He asked it to be nice to her.

They played together for over an hour, and my son was consistently kind and gentle to her, and when he thought she was doing something dangerous, he came and told me (she was trying to climb a tree using a very small branch).

Nobody deserves a considerate child, sometimes you just get one.