A Lawyer’s Vacation

I am sitting in my Victorville Office getting ready to do some tasks.

I plan to leave at noon. After all, I’m on vacation.

Originally I hoped to spend a week somewhere else, reading, writing, eating, napping. When I was a Public Defender in Orange County I used to do just that–I’d rent a motel room at Pacific Beach, spend the days walking the boardwalk and eating at Joe’s Crab Shack. Eden.

Unfortunately, not one but two different clients had court hearings scheduled without asking me first. And they are Wednesday and Thursday. Smack dab in the middle of the week. Can’t even take a four day holiday. Sigh.

Since I have been solo, vacations are hard to come by. I did slip off to Michigan in March for the birth of my first grandchild. She was stubborn and didn’t make her appearance in this world until two days before I left, and then she insisted on staying in the hospital so that she couldn’t have visitors.

I might add, even when on my vacation in Michigan I still had to make about six calls about cases back home.

A lawyer’s vacation, a writer once noted, comes in the pause between asking the witness a question and the answer.

Or, as the old joke goes, why do lawyers like Fridays? Because there’s only two more working days till Monday.

I will stubbornly insist on leaving at noon, just to keep the illusion that I am taking some time off. But it’s already 11:15 and I’ve spent most of the morning answering telephone calls and emails, not on the three tasks I’ve appointed myself. sigh.

The moral of this story, children, is to avoid becoming a lawyer at all costs. Hell, even doctors get vacations.