When I last wrote about my niece Emma, she was an all-Ivy scholar and athlete, the leading scorer and captain of her college soccer team. Since that ground-breaking blog entry of 2012, Emma has played professional soccer. She is still, as I described her back then, pretty, smart, personable and modest, a woman who not only knows how to take …
Many years ago, when I first started work at D.C. Superior Court, I had a daily encounter with an older woman as I came into the court building each morning. Dressed nicely and sitting on the bank of chairs outside the lawyer’s lounge, the woman always appeared to be speaking on the phone about some weighty constitutional issue. The woman …
Her voice is soft and tentative. She may be trying to apologize, but the sniffling makes it hard to understand her. What is clear is that she is feeling pretty sorry for herself. If I stood next to her at a plea hearing in D.C. Superior Court, she would not have impressed me as someone with any substance or maturity. …
I spend a lot of time on the Acela. So too do other people I have encountered in the quiet car over the last year or so: Tony Fauci, Matt Gaetz, Charlie Gibson, John King, Elise Stefanik, Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe Walsh, and Dan Goldman. In some cases, such as with Gaetz or Stefanik, I have had to suppress the …
It is almost as if our former President intentionally peppers his unhinged and whiny tweets with spelling and grammatical errors. He wants to show his devoted followers he is just like they are.
I look forward to seeing him every morning. We do our little exchange, our private joke, and then we fist bump, and I continue onto the metro smiling and in much better spirits.
This is why we say goodbye. Letting go is what it comes to.
My wife has a history of agreeing to rent or buy the first place we visit whenever we are looking for a place to live. This is great, she says. We’ll take it.
Representing the bad guys: Criminal defense lawyers sometimes make tradeoffs when we take on domestic violence cases
I have to be careful — as I grow more experienced and continue to age –that I don’t turn into the stereotype of the cranky old criminal defense lawyer.
Because the grandmother is deaf, she does not hear the police officers assembling on the front porch of her rowhouse.
Guest Post by Raymond Koehler on “Trump as Tragic Hero”
Like Oedipus, the classic tragic hero who was felled by his excessive pride and self-righteousness, Trump has been done in by his own personal failings. I am convinced, for example, that but for the fallout from Trump’s narcissism, he would have gone down in history as a successful two-term president.
A close relative — someone I have admired my entire life — is photographed wearing a red MAGA hat. It is one of the most upsetting photographs I have ever seen.
“Please hold for the President of the United States.” What could be more exciting than to receive a telephone call with these words?
People laugh at your jokes when you are in a position of power. They return your phone calls. Our attention-seeking president is in for one rude awakening.
This, for now, is our piece of earth. I clear away the brush and stack the wood in a pile near the shed and think: This is the possible we hold so briefly to.
Thirty-five years ago, my wife would take a break from her law school studies to join me in the tiny bedroom of our apartment to watch a half hour of TV before bed. The world seemed so big back then; our concerns in retrospect so small.
Jackson spoke with three separate women, and he was a different person depending on which of the women he was on the phone with. He had phone sex with one woman.
Mike O’Neill of “Mike and Heather” has died. We drive up to the wake in Lansford, Pennsylvania. It is reassuring to see Heather and their four adult children.
My wife and I have gone full circle. We started off our lives together in a small rental apartment in D.C. Three kids, four cities, six houses and a lifetime later, we are now back in a small rental apartment in D.C.
We were not the first tourists to visit the village of Tolo. But we were the first foreign family to spend a significant amount of time there — almost a year in 1972 followed by multiple summers. And with seven of us in the family, including five children, it was inevitable we would make a lot of friends. Forty-seven years …
I sit across from a colleague in her office at the Public Defender Service in D.C. A list of names from the jail is on her desk. Some of the names have been crossed out. Others have been highlighted or checked. “Names are naked things,” my father once wrote. Lists are “an alphabet not intimate like words.” Our flesh moves …
“I am in.” This is what my niece Meg says as she forces open a window on the first-floor and crawls into the building. She comes around to the front door to let the rest of us in. I am horrified. I am also impressed. I follow my sister and daughter into the building to join her. We have just …
The President of the United States has access to the best minds in the country. Presumably, this includes people with a basic grasp of grammar and syntax. “Despite this substantial income figure and tax paid, it is totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns.” This is an 18-word sentence from a statement issued recently by the White House. First, …
My wife believes in helping out those who are less fortunate. I believe that if everyone would stop giving money to the panhandlers who frequent every major traffic intersection in Baltimore, the panhandlers would be gone within a week. If I were to ever run for office, I would have two planks on my platform. The first would be for …
Guest Entry by Mary Anne Brush Mindfulness. It’s become quite the buzzword, but what does it mean? Jon Kabat-Zinn, teacher of mindfulness meditation and founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, defines it as paying attention on purpose. It’s an effort to be ever-present with an experience in the moment. When it comes …
I am hit so hard that my boot flies off as I fall backward. The boot slides across the bricks out onto the street. Our dog scampers after it. She thinks we are playing. I should have seen the three young people – two males and a female – standing on the corner in the dark waiting for me. But …
Guest Post by Mary Anne Brush (Re-printed from the Grosse Pointe News) Two milestones mark either end of my summer. My 90-year-old mother died at the end of May and my youngest child will leave for college at the end of August. Within the space of three months, I will have become both an orphan and an empty nester. The …
Many years ago, our mother had to go to the hospital, and it took the doctors a long time to figure out what was wrong with her. During that time, she was running a very high fever and was delirious. She was also being uncharacteristically difficult. They took her children out in the hall separately to ask us questions. We …
My wife and I have tickets to see Bob Dylan at the Lyric. This is good news. I like Bob Dylan. And although my wife may not be terribly enthusiastic about his music, she is always happy to go out. Besides, the Lyric is just a couple of blocks from our house. We won’t need to worry about parking. * …
Our son is home from college. The front door opens and there he is: Tall and slender, like Telemachus standing in the doorway of the shepherd’s hut. There is the pile of clothes in his bedroom, the groan of pipes as he turns off the shower every morning, and the male voice rumbling from the floorboards beneath me. And then, …
We live on Park Avenue. It is a beautiful tree-lined street in an historic part of town. But it is not what you think: It is not Park Avenue in New York City. And that is because we live in Baltimore. That is the thing about this city. For every street, bridge, monument, or tourist attraction, there is a street, …
Guest Post By Raymond Koehler I have written for my brother’s law blog before and received a nice response. In fact, Jamie said my post got more responses than any of his own posts. One thing you must know about Jamie, or, to use his more professional sounding name, “Jamison,” is that he is the most appreciative brother you could …
After dinner, my brother joins the younger generation in a game of Ultimate Frisbee. I opt to sit out of the game, joining our mother on the sidelines instead. My brother used to be the organizer. There was not a game played at Cape Cod – a game of Scrabble or Kick the Can or Capture the Flag — that …
The Academy Award-nominated documentary The Invisible War begins with the individual stories of men and women who had been raped while serving in the military. We then see one of the women, Kori Cioca, driving across the country to come to D.C. The movie climaxes with the meeting of the women in the conference room of our office in Georgetown. …
My brother teaches classics at an inner city high school in Connecticut. Just the other day he called me with a student on the phone. Interested in a career in the law, the student wanted to know whether she should study business or political science. I told her that her major did not really matter. Take the classes you are …
Thirty years ago my wife and I hustled across Key Bridge from Georgetown into Rosslyn so that we could hole up in my apartment during a major snowstorm. Stopping at a grocery store on the way there, we did not see another human being for the next four days. We were cocooning before anyone else thought of that use of …
It is 8 degrees Fahrenheit, and we have no heat on three floors of our new house. Our prime contractor realized he was in over his head and ran off with our money, leaving most of the planned work undone. We had a brief standoff with the subcontractor, Neil Schoonover, who was halfway through installing HVAC on the top two …
Many years ago my sisters rescued a baby bird who had been separated from its nest during a storm. Acting on the advice of our veterinarian neighbor, we fed peanut butter bread-balls into its open beak. The redness of the little bird’s throat faded with every ball. Transforming himself from a jumble of spindly bone and wet feathers into what …
Dear George: Without children at home to figure out all-things-electronic for us, Susan and I can’t get our television to work. So we walk over to a Sports Bar on Charles Street to watch the Redskins game. I have not missed a single play since RG-III joined the team. Susan is not a big football fan but she likes to …
Our “House of Cards” neighbor gave me a tour of the house. I felt honored to get inside, considering that we now have carloads of young people who pull up to photograph themselves outside on the front step. At first I didn’t realize what was going on, and when I agreed to photograph a group of the young people all …
During the second week of our empty-nesting, Susan and I take the train up to New York. She is accepting an award from SELF magazine as a “woman doing good.” I hang out at the hotel drafting a brief while she does publicity and makeup things at SELF. Then we head over to Riverpark, a restaurant on the East River, …
I got held up on my way to Union Station today. Or at least I think I did. I had finished up early at court and was heading over to the station to catch the next MARC train, and I was walking through what you could euphemistically call a “transitional” neighborhood near the food kitchen on E Street. I was …
You buy an axe. The axe consists of two parts, a handle and a blade. After six months, the blade breaks and you replace it with another one. After another six months, the handle breaks and you replace it with another handle. The question they ask in your Philosophy 101 class in college is this: Is this the same axe …
So I walk into the building for a meeting with our new banker in Baltimore, and I notice that everyone seems to be unusually surly towards me. The security guard tells me to take off my hat, and when I tell him who I want to meet with, he motions me toward a row of chairs and then ignores me …
My children are pleasantly surprised when they see the new house and neighborhood. They are city kids at heart. Although a bicycle is stolen from the garage within moments of our arrival, the perpetrators taking advantage of moving men preoccupied with something going on inside the house, the children walk to the hardware store for some extra surge protectors and …
Having sold our house in Virginia, we are now renting it back from the new owners. We will do this until we move to Baltimore in July. No longer an owner of this house, I step out of the shower this morning to find a tree guy poking around in our back yard. I stick my head out the back …
A couple of years ago, shortly after we moved back to Arlington, I decided to stroll by our old house, just a mile or so from where we live now. I was standing in front of the house, admiring the improvements the new owners had made to the front yard, when the woman drove up in her mini-van. I was …
My wife is not real picky. That is fortunate for me. Otherwise, she might never have decided to marry me. We were visiting different neighborhoods in Baltimore this past weekend in advance of a possible move there next summer, and we happened to run into a woman on the street who turned out to be realtor. The woman was the …
I am standing with my niece in front of my father’s bureau, and I show her the gold-plated watch with the “Hamilton” typed out across its face. My father loved pocket watches and there are a couple of them still sitting on his bureau so it takes me a moment to find the right one. The watch I select is …
He was the angry and alienated younger brother of my best friend while I was growing up. My mother sent me newspaper clippings about him when he was a member of a grunge rock band of local renown. She didn’t need to send me anything when he became nationally and then internationally known: Spin magazine put him on its cover …
Here are 11 rules for effective writing, with thanks to Kendall Gray of The Appellate Recordfor reminding me of them: Avoid alliteration. Always. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They’re old hat.) Eschew ampersands and abbreviations, etc. One should never generalize. Comparisons are as bad as clichés. Be more or less specific. Sentence …
He was the best octopus hunter in Tolo. It was always an honor whenever he sent one of us boys out to the kiosk to buy him cigarettes: Karelia ke spirta, parakalo. It was an even bigger honor if he invited you along to hunt for octopus. He did the diving. You stayed on the surface, holding onto the octopi he …
My older son brought his girlfriend home to meet the parents. Actually, he came home from college to take care of some personal business and he brought the woman he is seeing along with him. But it has the same practical effect of something potentially more meaningful. My wife picked them up last night at the train station after I …
We have been coming to Cape Cod with my extended family now for 25 years. We came first as couples. Then we came with children. With the 13 cousins growing up and the rest of us just getting old, it is unclear how many more years we will cross the Sagamore Bridge to make this trip. Like a game of …
Ten years ago this month, I walked out of the Ronald Reagan Building carrying a single cardboard box. Having just resigned from the federal government, the box contained all I had to show after an 18-year career: a coffee mug, photographs, some personal papers, and the plaque they had just given me at a going-away party. The last thing I …
It must be pretty intimidating to arrive at the courthouse for trial to find five police officers, an eyewitness, and a complaining witness all sitting in the hallway, laughing and joking with each other and then growing silent as you pass by – all of them there for the sole purpose of testifying against you, their bond a common interest …
My wife complains about all the closet space I take up with my neckties. I do have lots of them. You see, I have this theory about ties, a theory that was finally confirmed by the guy who sells me my clothes. If you keep wearing the same tie, the tie will refuse to lie flat after a couple of …
The “Family Tree” people from Belchertown have taken down most of the big trees in my parents’ yard. My oldest sister – the one who helps my mother with her finances — hired them to do some trimming. They came back when my sister wasn’t there, again and again, each time getting my mother – always so cheerful, always so …
I only took two years of Latin in High School. It was years before I actually admitted this to my children. Because I often cited the Latin origins of a word, they assumed I was this great Latin scholar. It was not until their education in the language began to overtake mine that I had to admit to them …
A number of years ago, while on vacation in Miami, my family and I were sitting in a restaurant when a man approached the table and handed my then 15-year-old daughter a paper rose. Angered by the intrusion, I took the rose from my daughter and tried to hand it back to him. The man refused to take it. …
Wayne, my investigator, thinks he is being subtle. He insists on escorting me out of a bad neighborhood whenever we finish a crime scene investigation, and he doesn’t realize I can see him lingering down the street as I climb into my car. But this guy is bigger than his childhood hero, Jack Lambert of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and …
Many of the rude words and gestures I know today I learned from driving with my father while growing up. I didn’t learn these things from my father, because I never once heard him utter a bad word. It wasn’t that using a curse word was in bad taste, though he clearly thought that too. It was that it was …
Snow I wake, and think so this is how it comes, no thunder, wind, or windstorm’s violence to rend our lower nature, only a presence. Outlines are familiar: light was present yesterday. Without event the miracle is here. Given the day, let crystal loose on me, to see beyond the accident of snow, this brilliance touched with rose. @ …
This is four or five years ago: I drive my father to the dentist. My father has been going to this same dentist for 50 years. The dentist used to clean my teeth. Once, when I was about 10 years old, he walked out into the waiting area during a break and announced to the receptionist – within hearing …
On Twitter, we can hear Mirriam Seddiq swearing for five hours because she is stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the beltway. It’s because of the snow. “3 miles,” she writes. “Haven’t come across a lot to leave the car in. Or neighborhood. When I do I’m gonna hoof it.” At 7:00 pm, my wife calls from traffic at a …
My mother fell on the ice in front of her house and broke her shoulder. She lay in the snow for 15 minutes before the emergency response people arrived. My two sisters who live in the area can only take off so much time from work. So I find myself on a train heading back to Massachusetts to spend some …
I stand by the bed. The fingers of your hand are loose and warm, and though your eyes are closed your head is toward me. Are you sleeping, in the country you have got to? On pathways of the blood you have withdrawn, walking younger with each step. The scene is in neutral tones, subdued as it is in dreams, …
I wake up in the same bed I slept in as a boy, in a house Sylvia Plath once likened to a walnut. If I went back in time to the days I shared the room with my brother, the room would look almost exactly the way it does now. There is not a single door in my parents’ house …
Every summer for the past 25 years, my wife and I have gone up to Cape Cod to spend a week with my family. The family used to cram itself into a three or four bedroom house my eldest sister rented in Orleans. As the family got larger with more in-laws and kids, we moved to a nine bedroom …