My friend Alison
Any pretty woman who becomes my friend has to pay a price for that friendship, although the price is in no way unreasonable; it consists simply of having her picture taken and posted to Flickr. And this one is no exception.
This is Alison, a law school graduate currently awaiting the results of the July bar examination in Arizona, and who was recently hired to fill a vacancy in our little corner of Family Court. I have spent much of my time over the past couple of weeks helping to train her, and as I once said to our boss in Alison's presence, having her around has been a delight.
I will only be involved in her training for a couple more days, after which she will be finishing it elsewhere; but in the time I have been with her, Alison has played a central role in a couple of amusing stories. The first one happened a couple of weeks before I took this picture, when another co-worker and I took her to lunch at a Mexican restaurant near the Arizona state capitol building. As we stood in line to place our orders, with Alison directly behind me, I perked up when I made out the music that was being played over the intercom and said it was "good salsa music." Then I broke into a spontaneous salsa dance, right there in that line, and Alison was quite amused by it. I told her I occasionally practice new dance steps while riding the elevator, waiting at a bus stop, or in other such situations, and that I knew the Fred Astaire people would understand that, even if other people who happened to witness it could not.
I have yet to hear the end of this. A few days later, a litigant in one of my conferences told me she had recently seen me in the elevator at the court. I had no recollection of having seen her there or anywhere else, but Alison, who was observing me that day, quipped that I would have been dancing in that elevator if the person the litigant had seen had in fact been me. She has since dropped a few other, similar remarks when other people have been around, and I get the distinct feeling that she derives some kind of perverse enjoyment out of watching my reaction.
The second tale concerns one of my most conspicuous flaws, which is that I am a packrat and a clutterbug. Big time. Years ago, I showed my wife a reproduction of a color painting that had been inserted in the frontispiece of my hardbound copy of _Don Quixote_, which showed the novel's principal character, sitting at a candlelit table in a cluttered study, totally absorbed in one of his books while hundreds of other volumes looked down at him from the dusty bookshelves which surrounded the room. Sheila said the scene reminded her of my law office in Ohio.
I have no trouble at all believing the New Testament account of Jesus feeding five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes, because I routinely perform a similar, albeit much less useful miracle all on my own. If you hand me a newspaper, I can make it multiply and divide into hundreds of other newspapers, which soon find their way into every nook and cranny of the house -- especially if I don't get around to reading the newspapers, which is all too often the case.
With that as background, one day Alison suddenly announced that it was time to clean up my office, and immediately undertook the task all by herself. I did not interfere, although I felt both sheepish and amused at the same time, and am sure I must have been blushing. Alison said she hoped she wasn't offending me; no, I replied, I wasn't offended at all, just embarrassed that I was no good at doing this myself and had created the necessity for her intervention. In other words, I simply recognized that she was doing something that really needed to be done, and was better able to do it than I was. And this isn't because I've never tried to declutter my office; it's just that I can't bear to part with an unread newspaper or magazine, and I tend to collect bits and pieces of assorted junk and papers for reasons I can't explain. Among numerous items Alison found and brought to my attention was a court calendar dated July of 2004, which she said she was sure I could do without; and I presented no convincing argument to the contrary, so out it went. My growing collection of Arizona Highways magazines was stacked neatly into a corner of one of my bookshelves, and a couple of half-empty water bottles left weeks before by previous litigants were chucked. It took Alison perhaps 15 minutes to have my office looking much better, even if not quite spic-and-span, although the trash can was overflowing by the time she finished this impromptu project.
Somehow it seems fitting that Alison and my other friend Nicole should know and like each other, because they both worked for the same judge for a time, and I have similar feelings for both women. And as was the case with Nicole, I believe firmly that Alison's job description simply must be changed, and that instead of what she is being trained for now, she needs to be made special assistant to me. That idea will get nowhere with the powers-that-be, of course, but it is certainly nice to think about.
Alison agreed to let me take pictures of her late one Friday afternoon. We went out into the patio area of the Superior Court complex in downtown Phoenix, and I snapped away for about 10 to 15 minutes. While she did ask me to delete certain images that she did not like, she knew full well that one or more of the remaining photos would end up here on Flickr, and she accepts that; again, it's simply the price of my friendship, and a natural and inevitable consequence thereof. But she was a very good sport about being my model that afternoon, and I liked this image best out of all the ones I took -- or at least out of the ones Alison allowed me to keep.
My friend Alison
Any pretty woman who becomes my friend has to pay a price for that friendship, although the price is in no way unreasonable; it consists simply of having her picture taken and posted to Flickr. And this one is no exception.
This is Alison, a law school graduate currently awaiting the results of the July bar examination in Arizona, and who was recently hired to fill a vacancy in our little corner of Family Court. I have spent much of my time over the past couple of weeks helping to train her, and as I once said to our boss in Alison's presence, having her around has been a delight.
I will only be involved in her training for a couple more days, after which she will be finishing it elsewhere; but in the time I have been with her, Alison has played a central role in a couple of amusing stories. The first one happened a couple of weeks before I took this picture, when another co-worker and I took her to lunch at a Mexican restaurant near the Arizona state capitol building. As we stood in line to place our orders, with Alison directly behind me, I perked up when I made out the music that was being played over the intercom and said it was "good salsa music." Then I broke into a spontaneous salsa dance, right there in that line, and Alison was quite amused by it. I told her I occasionally practice new dance steps while riding the elevator, waiting at a bus stop, or in other such situations, and that I knew the Fred Astaire people would understand that, even if other people who happened to witness it could not.
I have yet to hear the end of this. A few days later, a litigant in one of my conferences told me she had recently seen me in the elevator at the court. I had no recollection of having seen her there or anywhere else, but Alison, who was observing me that day, quipped that I would have been dancing in that elevator if the person the litigant had seen had in fact been me. She has since dropped a few other, similar remarks when other people have been around, and I get the distinct feeling that she derives some kind of perverse enjoyment out of watching my reaction.
The second tale concerns one of my most conspicuous flaws, which is that I am a packrat and a clutterbug. Big time. Years ago, I showed my wife a reproduction of a color painting that had been inserted in the frontispiece of my hardbound copy of _Don Quixote_, which showed the novel's principal character, sitting at a candlelit table in a cluttered study, totally absorbed in one of his books while hundreds of other volumes looked down at him from the dusty bookshelves which surrounded the room. Sheila said the scene reminded her of my law office in Ohio.
I have no trouble at all believing the New Testament account of Jesus feeding five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes, because I routinely perform a similar, albeit much less useful miracle all on my own. If you hand me a newspaper, I can make it multiply and divide into hundreds of other newspapers, which soon find their way into every nook and cranny of the house -- especially if I don't get around to reading the newspapers, which is all too often the case.
With that as background, one day Alison suddenly announced that it was time to clean up my office, and immediately undertook the task all by herself. I did not interfere, although I felt both sheepish and amused at the same time, and am sure I must have been blushing. Alison said she hoped she wasn't offending me; no, I replied, I wasn't offended at all, just embarrassed that I was no good at doing this myself and had created the necessity for her intervention. In other words, I simply recognized that she was doing something that really needed to be done, and was better able to do it than I was. And this isn't because I've never tried to declutter my office; it's just that I can't bear to part with an unread newspaper or magazine, and I tend to collect bits and pieces of assorted junk and papers for reasons I can't explain. Among numerous items Alison found and brought to my attention was a court calendar dated July of 2004, which she said she was sure I could do without; and I presented no convincing argument to the contrary, so out it went. My growing collection of Arizona Highways magazines was stacked neatly into a corner of one of my bookshelves, and a couple of half-empty water bottles left weeks before by previous litigants were chucked. It took Alison perhaps 15 minutes to have my office looking much better, even if not quite spic-and-span, although the trash can was overflowing by the time she finished this impromptu project.
Somehow it seems fitting that Alison and my other friend Nicole should know and like each other, because they both worked for the same judge for a time, and I have similar feelings for both women. And as was the case with Nicole, I believe firmly that Alison's job description simply must be changed, and that instead of what she is being trained for now, she needs to be made special assistant to me. That idea will get nowhere with the powers-that-be, of course, but it is certainly nice to think about.
Alison agreed to let me take pictures of her late one Friday afternoon. We went out into the patio area of the Superior Court complex in downtown Phoenix, and I snapped away for about 10 to 15 minutes. While she did ask me to delete certain images that she did not like, she knew full well that one or more of the remaining photos would end up here on Flickr, and she accepts that; again, it's simply the price of my friendship, and a natural and inevitable consequence thereof. But she was a very good sport about being my model that afternoon, and I liked this image best out of all the ones I took -- or at least out of the ones Alison allowed me to keep.