Dad

 

My dad. Yes, we have the same eyes.

Last week during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, her father, an attorney, was mentioned several times. Judge Jackson said she learned to love the law as a little girl, sitting at the kitchen table, doing her homework while her father, a law school student, studied along with her.

That could almost have been the case for me, except I didn’t come to truly love the law until I was in law school myself. (Reading courtroom dramas like Presumed Innocent and Snow Falling on Cedars or watching every episode of L.A. Law, notwithstanding.) And I had no idea—until I started law school—that my father accomplished his own study of the law when I was a little girl in school, but he didn’t do his studying at the kitchen table.

Let me backtrack just a bit.

My father was born in Wisconsin on the land his great-grandparents homesteaded after immigrating from Ireland. They were farmers. They were poor. But they had come to the Land of Opportunity. When my dad was still a boy, his parents moved with their seven children to Illinois, where they lived in a small house that boasted one indoor bathroom. Dad’s mother died when he was sixteen, and in order to help support his family, he left high school and joined the Civilian Conservation Corp. After a stint there, he joined the Army. When he returned home at the end of WWII, he got a job first as a taxi driver, then as a cop in Highland Park, Illinois, the same suburb he’d settled in after he married my mother.

Mom and Dad moved to California the same year that I was born, bringing with them a few belongings in a U-Haul trailer and, oh yeah, my three sibs. Dad took a job as a security guard for what was then Douglas Aircraft Company, an aerospace manufacturer in Long Beach. He worked swing and sometimes graveyard shifts. When I returned home from kindergarten in the afternoon, he would be in his uniform, ready for work, but eating whatever hot meal Mom had prepared for him, since he had to take his “lunch” to work in one of those cool metal lunch boxes that are rectangular in shape but have a domed lid for storing a thermos. Dad carried a big thermos separately, though, a small fact that made complete sense when my mother explained how my father managed to work full time and attend law school. She didn’t volunteer that information. I had to ask her. The question was no doubt posed sounding something like this: How the hell did Dad work full time for Douglas and still go to law school and do all the reading?

Reason I asked: I graduated from UC Riverside in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in English and went straight from there to Western State College of Law the following August. I was thirty-six years old and a single parent with sole custody of my four children. I carried sixteen units the first and only semester I attended, and it nearly killed me—literally. I ended up in the ER with pleurisy, and if that hadn’t brought me down, I would have been crushed by the weight of guilt anyway for spending zero quality time with my kids from August to December that year. So I withdrew.

I loved my classes. I loved the law library. I loved the process of studying what the law says and applying it to cases. I loved everything about law school—except having to read pages and pages of case law every single day in order to be ready in case I was called upon in class. To be honest, with four kids and two dogs and no second parent helping, I don’t know how I managed to get through that one semester. I know I didn’t sleep much.

So you understand, then, my question to my mother.

What she said in response gave me a whole new respect for my daddy. There was no room for a thermos in that old black lunchbox because that’s where my father carried his books. It was against company policy for the guards to bring reading materials with them to work. So Dad very carefully cut up his outrageously expensive law books (decades later, in speaking of it, my mother was still pitching fits about how “those books cost a small fortune” and “he cut them all to pieces”) and took them to work in sections, reading on his breaks and his lunch and, I have no doubt, in the still of the night when he was sure no saboteurs or spies or bosses were about. Way to go, Dad.

Here was a man who earned his high school diploma by taking a GED exam, never went to college but had the determination to apply to law school, then slowly and methodically work his way along until he finished—and passed the bar. He was immediately hired by the IRS to do tax law.

This could have been such a Cinderella story…. Except that not long after starting his new job, he began to have some serious medical issues. Within a few months, he was diagnosed with primary amyloidosis, a disease that would have him in and out of the hospital for the next two years until he passed away from its devastation. Damn it.

I chose law school after my undergrad education for the same reason my father did; I wanted to move my family up economically. I wanted to do whatever it would take to make sure my children were provided for. But after my first semester, I had to come to terms with the truth that providing for my children meant giving them what they needed emotionally and psychologically as much as providing food, shelter, and clothing. In choosing a career in teaching, I not only had more time to spend with them, I also had the privilege of nurturing hundreds of other kids, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world.

Still. Check out my pops, y’all. He was a pretty fierce warrior daddy, wasn’t he?