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Bar News - February 21, 2003 An Apple Sticker a Day... By: Richard G. Freeman A LETTER ARRIVED from a prisoner. In 27 years of reading inmate mail, I developed the rewarding habit of pausing to examine the envelope, taking in the deliberate handwriting, sometimes a needless honorific in the address. Occasionally, there is artwork. Frequently, the content of the letter outdoes the wrapping, especially the invented invocations to the deity fashioned by the imprisoned Muslims. This time, the envelope bore a feature that moved my heart suddenly one whole inch. In closing the envelope containing his rambling plea, my client applied what he had at hand. He took that tiny element of often-overlooked found art - the sticker from an apple - and used it to ensure the contents were sealed. After reading its contents and reminding myself to clear time to visit this man in jail, I returned to the envelope and mused. I tried to recreate the steps that led to the act of the prisoner delicately applying the colorful apple sticker to his correspondence. After finishing his inadequate meal and before ingesting the apple, he removed the sticker, secreted it in his dirt-green prison pajamas and returned to his cell. There he worked on his prayer for help - a prayer that contained equal elements of frustration, presumed legal know-how and demands for the impossible - then folded the document confidently in the cheap envelope he obtained from the generous Bureau of Prisons and, wisely remembering that these generic envelopes don't always seal, retrieved the secreted sticker and pressed it into place. He did this not for art's sake, but because he had no other means to accomplish this function; the sticker on the apple at that moment was all he owned. At criminal sentencings, I try to take the time to remind the Court of Kierkegaard's observation that "every man born is an exception." The sticker on the apple brought my mind around abruptly to this proposition: My client is more than a problem to be solved; he is a human being. At some point, usually early in the practice, we suffer this vague epiphany and then it moves on. Frequently, the incidental nature of any benefit to a human being our efforts may produce is a function of our specialty and its place in the adversarial system. Who cares about happiness when the issue is a challenged lapse under some portion of the securities law? No apple stickers will fly in your face in that kind of practice. And yet somewhere in all we do the ultimate outcome is to alter the daily pattern of someone's life despite the arcane details of the work at hand. I frequently hear lawyers, including myself, air the semi-serious observation that the practice of law would run much more smoothly without the impediment of clients. Who really wants to return the telephone call from a real live client - domestic noises in the background - inquiring about the progress of his case when you know there has been no progress? Our reluctance to return that telephone call reflects what I would call the "priesthood" syndrome. So much of what we do as lawyers is indulgence, perhaps useful, explicable only to our colleagues and ourselves and capable in exercise of leaving the gasping client behind. Take discovery disputes, fourth amended complaints, scheduling battles, protective orders, what have you. Where is the real need of the human client in all this? In his latest novel, "Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age," the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe takes up the same question in a more pointed context. The narrator, a novelist, realizes that his purely intellectual concerns are of no help in resolving a crisis in his family. His disabled, mentally challenged son is growing up and requires a path, a method of dealing with real life as a young man hampered by disabilities. The novelist/narrator, lamenting the irony that a life of advanced education has left him unable to shape real solutions to real human problems, determines to do what he can. He involves himself in the poetry of William Blake for the purpose of equipping himself with "definitions" of life's experience - such as birth and death and betrayal - that he can impart to his son in concise language. The son's situation in the novel and the sticker on the apple are embodiments of the challenges that face the educated who join any priesthood - lawyers, medical doctors, academic intellectuals, novelists - to be arrested in your presumptions by concrete human presence and concrete human need. These are not easy challenges. It sounds like simplicity itself simply to face another person and correspond in person or on the telephone in her terms, rather than the forms we have to rely on. The occasional apple stickers - human reality intruding on our professional consciousness - remind us, though, that one way to end our days justified is to try. Richard G. Freeman is a sole practitioner in Philadelphia. This article was originally published in the January 2003 issue of The Philadelphia Lawyer, © 2003 Philadelphia Bar Association, and is reprinted with permission.
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