Dirty Fingernails

I am, by trade, an attorney. You know, attorney. We dress nice. We have perfectly coiffed hair. We are well built and shapely so that the stray client conceives an indescribable passion for us and pulls us into bed.

So the lawyer novels would tell you.

One thing for sure, lawyers have clean fingernails. What would cause a lawyer to have dirt under his nails? Grimy law? Dirty clients? Karma?

I am, sad to say, a lawyer with dirty fingernails. I don’t know how it happens. I shower regularly. I don’t play in the mud, even when the other lawyer wants to. I go to work and push papers and answer emails.

And by noon my fingernails look like I’ve been digging ditches.

I can’t tell you. I can tell you it’s embarrassing when a client will note, as one older Chinese woman once did, that I needed to clean my nails before I shook hands with her. Like dirty fingernails are contagious.

Right now, as I type this on a Sunday night, my nails are pristine. I’ve just taken a shower and I feel clean and ready to go.

Yet by tomorrow the nails will look like a miner’s. And I don’t sleep in the dirt, so there’s no explanation.

Ah, my friends. Next year I will be retired. I will be able to sit at home and blog at will and write my dumb little stories, hoping someone will want them.

And one thing the editors won’t ask: Are his fingernails clean?