Time

It was the appointed time, and so we all gathered on a Zoom call, my two brothers, my sister and I. The purpose of the call – or at least the reason I laid out in my email to them a week or so earlier – was to review our elderly mother’s financial affairs. We did this each year in December as the year neared its end and a new one was about to begin. You might imagine conversations like these could be quite difficult. There are so many good stories – and HBO series too – about families fighting about money. For us, these calls have actually become a rather pleasant ritual of sorts, an excuse to just be together. Like sporting events for men.

The four of us, we’re blessed that none has a deep craving, like our mother did, to gather up as much money as possible for ourselves. So the actual conversation about the money is rather short and uncontentious. Getting along doesn’t make for a good story, or an HBO series. Just a good time.

“Do you think we should buy some Bitcoin for her?” my brother Cliff asked. There was a noticeable silence.

“I don’t really think so,” I said, breaking the silence after 15 seconds or so.

“Ok,” he said. The others staring straight ahead into their cameras, appearing attentive yet silent. That wasn’t too bad, I thought. Not exactly riveting drama, though.

Our Mom has been rather disabled for six years now. That’s a long time. She is confined mostly to a hospital bed in her Upper East Side apartment. Because she did gather up most of the money from our father and her second husband, and also because she had some company stock from the 20 years working in corporate America after raising her children, she could afford the round-the-clock care she’s been getting all along now.

So the Zoom call quickly moved from money to small talk. It lasted the better part of an hour, the four of us just wanting to share another moment or two together. The call was reassuring, a comfort in just being together, if only virtually, and getting along. I think we are all just a little surprised when it happens, even though it’s been this way for years now. My sister sent a short email afterwards.

“That zoom was great. Cliff n Charlie will be around in person soon so zoom won't be necessary, but in the spring or whenever, we should try to zoom together again. Love you all. Now that I am a senior citizen I am appreciating family sibs etc more n more.”

Time has been kind to our relationships.

But my sister’s email neglected one very brief but jarring moment on the call. About halfway through the small talk, just after Cliff described the Italian coast where he had been spending much of the pandemic, Charlie voiced his puzzlement over the latest COVID restrictions in New York. And as he did, he made a small gesture, raising his hands to his face and then making a noticeable grimace. It took my breath away. In that moment, and it was just a moment, Charlie’s face morphed into the face of our father from 1967 or so. Dad reappeared after being dead for ten years. It was as if Zoom had discovered time travel, built it into the software, and then transported us, even if only for this brief moment, back some 50 years. I was stunned, and I missed the conversation altogether for the next few seconds.

“Did you see that, Cliff?” I asked.

Cliff had just started talking about how the Italian authorities were locking things down again and couldn’t make out what I was saying. “Did you say something, Cole?”

“Yeah. Did you see that?” I said.

Cliff seemed confused. “What are you talking about?” I moved closer to the camera on my laptop, thinking that I might be able to connect better. Of course, all I managed to do was distort my face. Cliff burst out laughing.

“That’s funny, Cole,” he said.

“Charlie. Dad. Didn’t you see that?” I pleaded.

“No,” he said.

Time travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s disorienting and mystifying. In just an instant, all kinds of memories stir to the surface. Some good, some not. The reaction, though, is wholly different when you see your father in yourself and not just in your brother. Or when you think something so innocently and then suddenly realize how your father said the same thing, over and again, decades ago. It’s unsettling in a much more worrying way.

I’ve been thinking about retirement a lot these days. It’s time for a change. Mostly, I’ve been thinking about time and how I’m using it. To-do lists. Calendars. Assignments. Staff meetings. Work outs. Performance appraisals. Writing. It’s not that I don’t like my paying jobs. It’s just that some of the people – mostly the one’s with titles like Chief of Staff or Counselor to the Acting Associate Deputy Attorney General – can be quite annoying. And frankly, the jobs just aren’t as fun as they used to be.

And so it happened. A stray and innocuous thought tumbled in: I kind of enjoyed the part of my job where I get to meet and know, just a bit, some interesting new people.

“Cole,” my Dad said. He was in the waiting room of his office, in his white coat, the kind all the doctors wore back then to remind everyone of their authority, and status, and that they were in charge. He had a handful of folders and loose papers in his hands. He reached down and dispensed with most of them, handing them to me. “Hold these, Cole.” He kept just one folder, opened it and turned it 90 degrees so the long ends were up and down. Stapled to the inside of the folder were a set of paper strips, each with what looked to be graphing paper, with lines that seemed to bounce all over the graphs.

He looked attentively at the graphs but spoke directly to me. “You know, I really don’t like reading EKGs, Cole. It’s really not that much fun anymore.” Then he looked down at eight-year-old me. “But you know what, Cole. I really enjoy the part of my job where I get to meet and know, just a bit, some really interesting people.”

My Dad was a doctor the way doctoring was practiced in the 1970s. Long waits in the waiting room. A secretary at a desk with a typewriter and a rotary phone. Long conversations about one’s personal life. How can you make a diagnosis without all the important information? A physical exam with lots of probing and a rubber glove or two. At least in the big city where I now live, that’s not the way doctoring is practiced. My doctor is a publicly traded company you can find on the NASDAQ. The robot doctor, I call her. I generally use the pronoun “her,” not out of disrespect for men doctors, but because it seems that “her” gets the least attention.

But the best part of my job was indeed meeting and getting to know new people. Not just because making friends and meeting people as a middle-aged person is not easy, but because the people I’ve been able to meet over the years have been modestly interesting. These were not, candidly, A-list celebrities of the legal profession, by and large. They were B-listers at best, and maybe lesser: lower court judges, back bench congressmen and women, Assistant United States Attorneys, federal public defenders, and probation officers. Many of them had interesting stories to tell, and each had opinions that were at least half-baked. I often saw them on a trip out of town for a day or two, and maybe, too, for a meal. These acquaintances were never too dangerous, innocuous really. Well almost always.

The phone rang in my hotel room. “Your taxi is here.”

“Ok. Thanks,” I said. I scurried around the hotel room to get the few things I needed for the meeting. I checked my tie in the mirror, left the room, and took the elevator to the lobby.

I stopped by the front desk on my way out. “Thank you for getting me the cab. I really appreciate it,” I said to the woman behind the desk.

I saw the cab outside, walked out the front doors of the hotel, and got in the back. “I’m going to the federal courthouse, please,” I said to the cab driver. The Chief federal judge in Vermont, who was then the Chair of a little agency called the U.S. Sentencing Commission, had invited us all to Burlington. I was there to represent the Attorney General.

“Sure,” the cab driver said. We drove out of the hotel and started what I thought would be a short, ten-minute, uneventful drive to the courthouse.

Just a few seconds later, the cab driver looked in the rearview mirror toward me. “Are you an attorney?” he asked. I looked up at what seemed from the back seat to be an older white man with long grey hair, someone you might expect to find driving a cab in Burlington. We made eye contact in the mirror for just a second.

“Yes, I am,” I said with just a tinge of pride.

“Oh,” he said. He paused for a moment or two. “Do you have a case being heard today?”

“No,” I said. “I work for the Justice Department. I have a meeting with Chief Judge Sessions.”

Now, the driver turned his head quickly and looked back at me to get a good and direct look. “Ohhhh,” his voice rising in tone just a little. It was noticeable.

“Do you know Judge Sessions?” I asked.

He looked in the mirror again. “Yes, I do,” he replied with some emphasis. He waited a beat or two. “Judge Sessions sentenced me to 24 years in prison for a non-violent drug offense.”

There’s nothing better to sharpen your attention and focus, raise your blood pressure, and quicken your heart rate than suddenly realizing you’re being driven around in the back of a cab by a former prisoner who knows that you work for the man.

What do I say now, I thought. I better say something. My mind was speeding up. This is getting awkward.

“Twenty-four years. That’s a lot of time,” I said. Oh God.

“Yeah,” the driver said, looking in the mirror with what now seemed to be a little more resolve. Or was it anger, I wondered.

That’s a lot of time. Where did you come up with that? I thought to myself. You’re going to get yourself killed.

Ok. What now? I knew the rules of federal sentencing. I also knew that Judge Sessions was a bleeding-heart liberal, recommended to the bench by Senator Leahy and appointed by President Clinton. Judge Sessions would only give that amount of time if he had to, if there was some mandatory minimum penalty that applied, if the guy did something terrible. Oh God.

But I couldn’t help myself. “You must have had several prior convictions?” I asked. You see with prior convictions there are long mandatory sentences in drug cases.

“No,” he said, emphatically. “It was my first offense.”

Hmm, I thought to myself. “Well, someone must have had a gun when you did it,” I said.

“Nope,” the driver said. “No guns. Non-violent marijuana offense.”

It all didn’t add up. This guy must have killed somebody with his bare hands. I thought smugly, if still frightened, that maybe I wasn’t getting the whole truth from the driver.

“So, this was a marijuana case with no guns,” I said slowly. “And you had no priors. It was non-violent. And Judge Sessions sentenced you to 24 years?” I said. “Is that right?”

He nodded. “Yeah.” There was one other possibility. But where was he taking me, I thought. Shouldn’t we have been to the courthouse by now.

“There must have been a lot of pot?” I said.

He looked in the rearview mirror. “Yeah,” he said. “54 tons.”

Holy crap, I thought. “That’s a lot of pot,” I said without thinking. I thought about it for a few seconds. I pictured him with a backpack full of pot. But 54 tons? “How do you move 54 tons of marijuana into Vermont?” I asked.

He didn’t hesitate. “By barge,” he said. “Down the St. Lawrence Seaway.”

We turned the corner, and I saw the courthouse. He carefully pulled the cab over to the curb. I was relieved. He turned around and looked at me. He looked like he was around 60 or so, an aging hippie. Not exactly Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. He had a devilish smile on his face, with not a hint of anger or resentment.

I tried to act cool. I pulled out my wallet to pay him, now with a little less trepidation. I thought I was going to make it. “There’s one thing I don’t get,” I said. “Judge Sessions hasn’t been on the bench more than 15 years. How are you out already?”

“Have you heard of a case called Booker v. United States,” he asked?

“Yes, I have,” I replied.

“The Supreme Court sent my case back to Judge Sessions. After twelve years, he had a change of heart. He thought I had done enough time. And he reduced my sentence to time served.”

I instinctively -- and wrongly -- thought that Sessions was a just softie.

“Those twelve years,” the driver said. “I guess it made him look at the case and look at me differently.”

I gave him a twenty-dollar bill. A good tip, but not too good. “Thanks for the ride,” I said. “I wish you well.”