Songs of Pain and Hope

I’ve had my guitar for 26 years.  Steel string, solid top, deep red.  With my basketball and Bible, I took it everywhere.  All that you can’t leave behind.

Never figured how to play solos that well, but focused on rhythm, jazz, and a style like U2’s Edge.  My favorite songs to play were With or Without You (my favorite all time song), Stay, Yellow Ledbetter, Plush, Gallows Pole, Over the Hills and Far Away.  

And of course, Stairway to Heaven.  I would play different segments specifically for each of my children.  For my daughter, my all time favorite part “And as we wind on down the road…” and for my son “If there’s a Bubu in your hedgerow don’t be alarmed now…”

And Amazing Grace.

One time, I led worship for the entire church (a rare time when all the congregations were gathered).  With just the sole acoustic guitar ringing out in the auditorium, you felt for a moment that all would be well.

“Through many dangers, toils, and snares

I have already come… and Grace will lead me home.”

The best years of my life.  A city where I had yearned to live in since my first year in the US.  My parents took us to Boston and surrounding areas.  And yes, Harvard to inspire me to attend one day (not a snowballs’s chance).  After several near misses (for law school and post-law school employment), I finally get the opportunity to live there due to a doctoral program.  By the grace of God, a last minute snag gets resolved and off I go.

Driving up the New Jersey Turnpike in an oversized truck with baby turtles (the surviving one is now 17) on the hood, narrowly avoiding overloading a small bridge, crashing the gate of the dropoff point.  Moving into an apartment on top of a Greek pizza shop.  Riding the T for the first time as a resident, crossing the Longfellow Bridge over the Charles.  Walking the Freedom Trail every time family and friends visited.

Those falls where the leaves were so beautiful that I thought my heart would break every time I saw them.

The brutal winters where I learned to never complain about the Maryland ones ever again.

And Fenway.  The first time entering the holy sanctuary.

Magical.  Just magical.

A period of my life where there was great hope and possibility.  Learned, read, taught, lived in Europe, met amazing mentors, Red Sox Nation, Patriots Way, Celtics Ubuntu, etc.  Every Boston team won a championship during my eight years there.  Close to mountains, beaches, forests.  A big small town where the girl was born.

Love that dirty water.

Home.

I’m really proud of my resume.  Not just because of what I had to do to earn it or the modest accomplishments it records.  Rather, more that it reflects what I believed in and who I strove to be.  Out of my peer group (give or take a few years), I’ve probably made the least amount of money and accumulated the fewest assets.  Instead, I got paid in laughter and joy.  Lots of experience, knowledge, and if I may say so with humility, a little perspective and wisdom.

One of the people who targeted me in NYC was an ass-kisser (the real term I use is a bit more profane), a backstabber, a liar, a manipulator, and a coward (he was so scared one time to even make a call to his superiors to postpone a meeting).  He even betrayed his own boss for what amounted to a hill of beans.  He focused on getting better sounding titles even when the squad was being reduced in size.  We had a nickname for him at the NYPD – silver tongue, black heart.  He gave my epileptic colleague literal fits.  So stupid, he boasted about having spies in the office.  A real spymaster does not do that.  George Smiley, he was not.  He lied about being a prosecutor (his law firm loaned him out while getting paid his six figure salary).

And he is now a Chief Judge of some agency or another, friends with Mayor Eric Adams, honored, etc.  I even think he won some “Man of the Year” award from his bar association.  His daughter who is my daughter’s age goes to a 45K private school in the city.

Yet, I woke up one morning and asked myself, would I trade places with him?  A quick and resounding no. 

Not worth it.  Don’t want it, don’t need it.  I may have been many things, good and bad, but I wasn’t that.  At the very least, coward isn’t and will not be anywhere near my name.

Who we are is what remains after all the trinkets are stripped away.

As to the daughter (and son), what father can tell them my stories?  Not too many, I venture.

And that school is certainly not teaching what I’ve picked up on this journey.

I’m not much of an outdoor person – no fishing, limited hiking, etc.  Living in Minnesota, I went to the Mall of America quite a bit.  Pretty fun actually.  A fun fact – during the winter, the mall has to pump in cold air from the outside to counter the body heat generated by the people inside.

I hurt my foot playing ball that summer.  You don’t know pain until you’ve injured your heel.  While it did prevent me from being scolded by church leaders for fouling hard, I had to walk around with a walking stick most of the time.

So I drove.  One of the most beautiful drives in the country, around Lake Superior after Duluth and beyond to the Canadian border.  Steel blue waters to the east, evergreen forests to the west.

I would play a combination of John Denver and Tupac Shakur on these drives. My roommate at the time would scoff.  I’m sorry – what is it with Asian Christians at times?  Get out of your bubble.

Tupac’s song “Only God Can Judge Me” stood out.  I used to dismiss it as bravado or defiance, but now it makes more sense.  Sometimes when I describe what I’ve experienced, I get utterly inappropriate replies.  One time even, when I tried to describe my casework to a pastor, he just turns his back and walks away.  I think that was actually the last time I bothered trying to tell anyone about my work.

Only God can judge me is spot on.  No human words can adequately describe the joy, pain, sins, contributions, games people played.  Much less weigh them all out.

I’ll be going to Minnesota in the spring to attend my mentor’s wife’s memorial service.  

I think I’ll make that drive again.  With Messrs. Denver and Shakur.

I’ve never told anyone the full extent of what I handled.  Only a student, who fought in Afghanistan, has ever directly asked me.  I didn’t even tell my criminal law students even if it would illustrate concepts.  I used Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, my pet turtles more in scenarios.  I’ve never pinpointed the reason and I’m not going to think too hard on it.

In Philadelphia, my office was spotless.  I had few case files lying around.  Some people thought I was barely working.  The opposite was true.  I was brutally efficient, completing double the cases of others, at least in my peer group (no slouches there in terms of law schools – Harvard, Emory, UVA, Villanova, Temple).  My office was clean because I sent the files back to storage.  All while starting and leading an Asian immigrant outreach program.

Few noticed.  My supervisors only realized this my last month when I stopped working.  I let the boxes stack up and refused reassigned cases.  I enjoyed my daily pretzel (Philly ones are the best).  I played hooky with a colleague to watch Revenge of the Sith.  A little balance in the universe isn’t the worst thing.

I’ve very selectively told some friends the most heinous ones.  They are nightmares.  If you think evil is a joke, it isn’t.

One of the cases that I will write about was as a student attorney.  I wrote significant portions of the brief (we lost).  Some knuckleheads decide to form a protection racket.  In order to drum up business, they decide to cause havoc in the neighborhood.  They shoot a 15 year old boy riding his bicycle with a hollow point bullet.  With a gun that cost $50.  Hollow points explode and disintegrate on impact.  The bullet shatters his internal organs and he bleeds out not far from his parents’ house.  The killers almost get away with it.  Unsolved for weeks, they brag at a party and that’s how they got caught.

I told no one except for an ER physician at church and the girl I lit the candles for.  That kid would have been 40 today.

I was a sensitive, shy, quiet child who cried a lot.  I hated going to preschool.  This fear of school never really went away until college.  My parents worked, so my aunt would drop and see me off at the bus stop.  I don’t recall exactly when this happened, but it was somewhere around the US equivalent of kindergarten or first grade.

On the bus, a bigger kid would often intimidate me and take my lunch money.  This went on for weeks.  One day, I gathered enough courage to yell at him at the bus stop when my aunt was present.  He didn’t bother me that day.

This didn’t last.  A few days later, he resumes his previous behavior.

This time though, I decided to go down swinging.  A quick prayer to God and I told him the Malaysian K-1st grade equivalent to go f___ himself. 

He hits me in the face.  It stings.  I hit him in the stomach.  He hits me again.  I now go all in, all out and pummel his stomach over and over again.

At the end, he is crumpled in a heap at the back of the bus.  When we arrive at school, he complains to the bus driver about me.  The bus driver just tells him that he deserved what he got.

And a good day was had by all.  Almost all.