“I had a baby.”
“Where is she?”
“At daycare.”
“Why?”
“Because bringing a one-year-old to third-grade math would be chaos.”
He considered this.
“Can she do fractions?”
“Not reliably.”
He nodded as though that settled it.
I laughed more that year than I had during the final three years of my marriage.
My father retired when Grace was four.
At his retirement dinner, hundreds of people attended.
Judges.
Attorneys.
Former clerks.
Public officials.
People whose names appeared in newspapers.
Dad hated almost every minute.
Grace loved the dessert table.
During his speech, he talked about institutions.
Precedent.
Humility.
Public trust.
Then near the end, he looked toward me.
I became nervous.
He had promised not to embarrass me.
“My daughter once accused me of making the law sound boring.”
The room laughed.
I covered my face.
“She was correct.”
More laughter.
“But the older I became, the more I understood that the law’s greatest promise is not that powerful people can use it.”
