June 2003

" — but enough about me. What do you think of me?"

by Lindsay Thompson
Bar News Editor

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each excursion of the essayist, each new "attempt," differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person — philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast.

— E.B. White, The Essays of E.B. White (1978)

Actor Charles Grodin tells of filming a movie in an English country house. Between takes he found himself in an adjoining room that was not part of the shot. The owner, passing, focused a steely gaze on Grodin and, with exquisite politeness, said, "It would be so nice if you weren't here."

A WSBA member, reading my April column, thought enough of it to tear it out and send it to me with the same suggestion. Well, actually, his comment was a little less polite: "What a lot of crap."

I wrote back to explain why I write these back-page digressions, citing E.B. White. He graciously replied that on rethinking, it wasn't all crap but maybe, as I'd written of opera, I'd passed several good places to stop.

So why an editor's page?

Simply put, it comes with the job. There's been an editor's page since 1947 (lawyers love tradition). Alert readers of A Certain Age will rightly point out that I can undercut that argument (it's always been that way) by my own conduct. I was entitled to a column in my last turn as editor and splashily announced, in my first issue, I wasn't going to write one every month. I think I wrote five or six in eight years. But as one of our members — Congressman George Nethercutt — once noted, things change. I decided this time around I'd give it a try.

An editor's page is a busman's holiday, a chance to actually write something after a month's worth of consulting with authors about the placement of semicolons, following the Board of Governors around the state and taking down their every word to spin into a digestible narrative explaining what they do and why, and juggling all the other balls that have to fall into place just so to produce an issue.

I moved the editor's page from the front of the book — where Official Pronouncements get made by Bar leadership — to the last page, where I can write about less official things. I've had my little turn as a Bar leader. It's more fun being the poacher than the gamekeeper.

Too many lawyers define themselves as lawyers, a state of existence different from being people. They remind me of Sam the Eagle on The Muppet Show, fussing about all the show's comedy skits being boring, inappropriate or incomprehensible (I guess that makes me Kermit the Harried Producer; readers, you get to be Statler and Waldorf).

It's too easy to get ground down by work, by the perfection it demands and the constant criticism (self-generated and other-generated) — not to mention the morbid urge to find fault with others — it evokes. Another reader, so vexed by an article she decided the entire magazine, editor and management were so incompetent as to warrant never reading the magazine again, received my usual "here's why we did whatever it was we did, we meant well, really" response, and then gave me the entire lecture again, slightly condensed.

More lawyers need to relax, to retrieve — or start building — some shoot-the-breeze time with colleagues into their routines. One of my Cowlitz County colleagues in the early 90s used to call my office after we had finished trials together. When I came back from court at day's end, there'd always be a slip in my box that he'd called to discuss State v. Miller. I'd walk from the Cowlitz County Courthouse to the Bridgebender Tavern next door, where I'd find him sitting at a table with a pitcher of Miller and two glasses, ready to talk about the case we'd just tried.

Sometimes this column will nudge ideas like that, and other suggestions on the pursuit of happiness, forward. If these essays seem too much to fit Dr. Johnson's definition of the term ("a loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece"), it's deliberate. We ought to have a little fun in this magazine. Think of this column as a chat among friends at the end of the day.

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