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Volume 25, Number 1 & 2 (2001) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum BURAK LOWELL B. KOMIE It’s now winter in Chicago. People are bundled up in quilted coats and boots and their breaths leave plumes in the air as I watch them from the train window. Chicago is very gray in winter, but this morning I see a man in a red cap in a scrap yard playing with a dog. I also passed some children in red snowsuits holding hands on their way to school. I’ve been reading John Updike’s Bech Is Back. The main character is a blocked author, Martin Bech, who has recently married a second time after several years of being divorced. He takes his wife to Israel on a honeymoon and in Jerusalem they walk along the Via Dolorosa and also visit the Dome of the Rock where a piece of the peak of Mount Moriah is preserved. Mount Moriah is the mountain from which Muhammad ascended to visit heaven. Their guide pointed to several indentations on the peak and told Bech that the indentations were from the footsteps of the horse Burak on which Muhammad ascended to heaven. I never knew Muhammad rode to visit heaven on a horse, let alone that the horse’s name was Burak. It’s a piece of information that has been floating in my mind for the last two days and I can’t get it out. It’s like a loose luminous chip. Yesterday I told a woman lawyer friend and associate about Burak and she just ignored me. We’d been in the Bankruptcy Court and after losing a contested motion we looked for a place to have a cup of coffee. She and her husband just returned from visiting his parents in Fort Lauderdale. They’d left their young child with his parents and had taken off for the Keys for a few days alone. She was still slightly tanned and hadn’t yet acclimated herself to Chicago. So she shivered as she told me that lawyers aren’t interested in hearing about Burak. The important thing about a lawyer’s life should be “freedom,” she said, staring moodily out the window at the bundled figures trudging by in the slush. "Like in the mornings, Bill really sweats getting to his firm by nine. He just doesn’t want to get in after any of the partners. Me, I work for myself, so I don’t really care. If I have something to do, I’ll get to the office. If I don’t, I take my time.” She sipped her coffee and stared out the window. “This is a great place, isn’t it? You can just sit here hidden and watch people go by. I used to come here between classes at law school.” She is right, of course, a solo practitioner is relatively free. But you’re never really free from the pressures of money or the demands of clients; the freedom really is a relative concept. If you’re worried about paying your office rent, you’re hardly in the mood to debate the relativity of freedom. Also, if you have become tyrannized by irrational clients, you’re not on your way to becoming a Philosopher King. Last night I switched from Updike to Isak Dinesen, the great Danish writer who wrote mostly about her life in Africa. She wrote that birds are really closest to God and unlike people occasionally brush wings with angels. I was at a concert last week at the Public Library across the street. On Wednesdays, they have free concerts, mostly young artists on tour who are passing through Chicago. I heard the pianist Jeremy Menuhin playing Schubert. All through the concert waves of pigeons flew outside against the tall windows. Had I read Dinesen’s speculation I would have closely watched the phalanxes of birds for the angels. I didn’t see any, but the music and the flights of birds past the windows almost sometime in rhythm were a marvelous mixture. After answering the phone all morning it really calmed me. I try to spend my lunch hours doing interesting things. Chicago has a great array of ethnic restaurants and shops. Just this week I’ve already eaten in a Polish restaurant and a Syrian place. After the Polish lunch my friend insisted on taking me across the street where two women were tailoring sheepskin coats in a tiny shop. The women were very shy and barely spoke English. I tried on a beautiful brown suede coat lined with sheepskin with a gray fur collar. I looked like a minister of the Czar right out of Gogol. My friend wanted to buy the coat for me as a gift. It was $300. I’ve known him for over 50 years, we went to grade school together, and he really meant that he wanted to give me the coat as a gift. I didn’t accept his gift. Perhaps I should have. Probably, subconsciously, I was afraid to walk around downtown in such a marvelous strange coat. The shop was full of steam from hissing irons and the women wore men’s trousers under their dresses and looked at us sadly when we left empty-handed. My life as a lawyer isn’t all concerts and exotic restaurants. I’m working on this piece today in a cab on the way to a client conference. Crosstown traffic is paralyzed. I have just broken out of the crush of thousands of commuters at Union Station. I was able to break away for a moment for a cup of coffee. I could barely get through the crowd into the cafeteria. People are very angry on the way to work. Mouths set, unsmiling, the workers are much younger than I, in their 20’s and 30’s. They’re all caught up in our obsession with time, work and order. There are clocks everywhere in the station blinking out the time, 8:37, 8:42, 8:39, they all give different times. I look for lawyer friends in the crowd. I see a man I know. He’s older now, and bent over from arthritis and walks slowly behind the crowd of young workers. The clock on the face of the Wrigley Building is exactly at 9:00 as I arrive at my office. I like the way the sunlight in my office touches upon the walls. I have a rather eclectic collection of things in my office. A pyramid of marbles my daughter made, a pencil can made of painted popsicle sticks, a wooden Viking soldier with a gray beard of fluff. I have a stereo and in the late afternoons I often listen to classical music, usually to wind the day down, but often to drown out the angry voice of the lawyer in the office next to me. I have several paintings, one of a bird in flight, a vivid blue painting, an abstract bird. In the morning light the blue is very fresh. I have a fern plant and a tiny portable fan. When I turn the fan on, its breeze comes at me through the softness of the fern. I also have a portrait of our three children and a snapshot of my wife with our dog on her lap. The snapshot of my wife rests against a seashell. I have lots of novels and other books in my bookshelf, but I seldom read them in my office. I have been a lawyer for 37 years. I have my diploma and my license framed on the wall. When I began as a young lawyer I was sent to a family friend who supposedly might offer me a job. Instead of a job, he gave me some advice: “Save your money, kid.” When I took the Bar, the lawyer who addressed us at the induction ceremony gave us this advice: “Nothing is more important than your health.” Another friend of my father’s gave me a $20 gold piece when I sent out my announcements: “Never spend it,” he told me. Within two weeks I had pawned it to pay my office bills. Now, many years later, I have learned about Burak, that he was a winged horse with a human face and that Muhammad, accompanied by the Angel Gabriel, rode Burak to heaven to visit God and Christ and then returned to Earth. I have also learned that I should not have pawned the $20 gold piece. It wasn’t really necessary. “Burak,” first published in Donna M. Killoughey (ed.), Survival Guide for Solo Lawyers 13 (Economics of Law Section, American Bar Association, 1984), republished by the Japanese Federation of Bar Associations under the title, “Following Burak’s Footsteps: The Elusive Quality of Life”) and collected in The Lawyer’s Chambers and Other Stories, pp. 129-132]. Lowell B. Komie © [1994] |
