"Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?"
-- Dr. Henry
Jones, Jr.
Or in my case, Contracts.
The Magnificent Seven (yes, there are still seven of us,
surprisingly) are rounding the corner into the home stretch of paralegal
classes. All that's left are a few huge, galumphing assignments, a smattering
of final exams, and we will be crowned, not with laurels, but with
Certificates. Yay. Go, us. Having conquered Torts and Texas Procedures, we next take keyboard in hand to slay the beast known as Contracts. And I'm having flashbacks.
Some of them are pleasant enough. Widgets, for example. In Contracts
hypotheticals, if there is a product being bought or sold, it is generally
widgets. I always imagined them as looking like wing nuts (hardware, not political). Shiny, silver-colored, and always purchased in great
numbers. Something one might fish out of one's pocket and fidget with during a
boring lecture.
In addition to the widgets, I'm seeing old friends in my
Contracts textbook: the Zehmers, who thought it would be fun to write a
"joke" sales contract for their farm on the back of a restaurant
guest check. Fairmount Glass which couldn't tell the difference between a price
quote and a contract. The Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway, which needed to read
offers from iron mills, not just answer them. Oldies but goodies, one and all.
But some of the flashbacks have been not so pleasant. My Contracts
professor at Western California State School of Law at Swami's Point
was a real pri- ahem -nce who said to me not once, but twice in the same
meeting about my midterm exam, "This is Law School. I'm not going to
spoon-feed you." Well, no risk of that with margin comments of "No,"
"Bad rule," and "Did you even read what you wrote?" in my
bluebook. And that was, as they say, all he wrote. Those ten words. And more than
that would have been "spoon-feeding?" I still can't decide whether he took a
personal dislike to me, or was he merely continuing his contemptuous treatment
of mere staff members. (I was one, and I had the temerity to try to rise above
that lowly station and take law classes! Imagine!) Seriously, I tried to drag
more information from him about "bad rule" by telling him that my
review of my class notes, the textbook, my outline, and (horrors!) a purchased
outline all agreed that that was indeed the rule. Clearly, I told him, if I was
so far off, I must have a fundamental misunderstanding somewhere, and need help
getting it corrected. That's when I was told he was not a delivery system for pablum.
Despite his best efforts, I did pass Contracts. With a
nice, mediocre "C," but I passed. And when I dropped out of law
school, I cheerfully threw away my Contracts notes. I neither peed on them nor
wiped my ass with them, but either would not have been out of line with my
feelings. And now giant, rusty, fanged widgets, zombie Zehmers, and evil, smoke-belching 19th-century
factories are all back. Laughing at me.
Is it just coincidence that the law school abbreviation for
Contracts, "K," is the same as the baseball scorecard symbol for
"strikeout?" I think not.
