MAY 21, 2024 – (Cont.) The years passed. While I was in my second year of law school, Fred died at the age of 80. I was saddened by his passing; over the years I’d enjoyed many meaningful conversations with him.
Ruth lived in the big house for a few years after Fred’s passing, then split off a separate lot on which she built a smaller yet still spacious home. In the meantime, for reasons that were none of my business, she mortgaged the original house and lot. This transaction involved lots of “paperwork,” of course, and since I was fresh out of law school, Ruth figured naively that I could competently review all the “paperwork” for her. I was equally naïve, however, in agreeing to her request. Never in law school—let alone in life generally—had I encountered such “paperwork,” but I could read, I figured, and to some extent I could think, so why not try to help Ruth?
Accordingly, late one afternoon she brought over a large envelope with draft versions of all the mortgage loan documents and disclosures she had been asked to sign, and I politely told Ruth I’d review them and give her my comments the next day. I then dutifully rounded up a yellow legal pad from a drawer of the tall maple secretary in our den, went up to my bedroom, where I spread out the papers on my wide-open desk top, and . . . went to work.
All the fine print of the standard Fannie Mae loan documents and federally mandated disclosure forms was an Amazonian jungle of language gobbledygook. More significantly, I had zero understanding of the securitization process by which millions of home loans are packaged, sliced and diced, and converted to collateral for bonds issued to the global debt markets. Aside from reviewing for accuracy names, dates, and addresses and rate and payment terms, there’s not a thing that a consumer (or “lawyer”) can do or say about standardized residential loan documents that will be securitized.
Of course I did not know this. Unwittingly, I fell into the rut occupied by many insecure lawyers, which is that if I didn’t take issue with something in a contract, what good was I as a lawyer? A decent lawyer would certainly never read multiple pages of fine print and say to the client, “Looks fine to me!” (with pun fully intended). Didn’t follow, then, that the more you marked things up, the more you found fault with one thing or another, the better the lawyer you were? The tougher, the more exacting?
Since I knew little to nothing about anything[1], I fell back on my knowledge of English usage, and focused mainly on editing grammatical and syntactical details. My efforts produced about five pages worth of comments, with carefully noted references to lines and paragraphs in the documents. I then made arrangements to sit down with Ruth and go through them.
She met me at the front entrance and led me into the kitchen where I’d sat many times before—the first time at the age of three when Mother, my sisters and I huddled there after fleeing our burning house.[2] This time, wearing my lawyer hat (actually a baseball cap), I was properly seated at the kitchen table. Ruth offered me cookies and lemonade—which was all that my legal services were worth. The further I plowed into my notes, the deeper the lines formed across Ruth’s forehead. “What do I tell the closer?” she finally asked.
I was stumped. What should she tell the closer, I thought, especially since I have no idea what a closer is? “Well,” I said, reaching for another cookie to distract from my embarrassment, “you could show the closer my notes.”
“Maybe you could call the closer?” By Ruth’s inflection I knew her question was intended as a request.
I panicked. “Uh, I suppose . . .” was the best I could do.
When I did get around to calling, I was shut down halfway into my first suggestion: how to render a particular sentence more concise. I was then faced with the embarrassing task of explaining to Ruth that I’d been wholly ineffectual in convincing the closer to accept any of my proposed changes to the documents. If Ruth had offered to pay me in any form other than the cookies and lemonade I’d already consumed, I would’ve refused to accept. Fortunately, she saved me the embarrassment of having to do so.
I last saw Ruth in a nursing home after she’d broken a leg. She was 90 and as sharp and alert as she’d been at 60.
EPILOGUE
After her new house was completed, Ruth sold what I thought was “the finest house on Rice Street” to Bob and Punchaj Parta, who had a son and a daughter. Bob was the chief deputy county attorney and was well-acquainted, of course, with our neighbor Bob Johnson (see 4/12/24 post), who for decades had served as the county attorney. Bob Parta and Punkaj had met in India during Bob’s stint in the Peace Corps there in the early seventies—when I was still in high school.
They were as solidly Democratic as Fred and Ruth had been die-hard Republicans. By the time I met the Partas, I was several years into the (real) practice of law. Despite their politics—or perhaps because of them—Mother was eager to introduce me to them during one of my Saturday afternoon visits home. “You’ll find them both very interesting,” she said. Mother was right. Gracious, outgoing, and spontaneous, they welcomed Mother and me when we made what we’d thought would be a brief call. After Bob brought out beverages and Punkaj, some snacks, we settled into a wide-ranging and rewarding conversation,. On subsequent visits to 505 Rice, I’d often see Bob or Punkaj across the street and inevitably continue the previous conversation we’d enjoyed.
Soon after Dad succumbed to multiple myeloma (at just days short of 88), Bob was diagnosed with the same disease. Having been diagnosed with MM myself, I take heart from these two cases. In the first instance Dad wasn’t diagnosed until treatment (other than palliative) was no longer an option. In Bob’s case, however, he lived another decade (plus, Bob had been a heavy smoker, which probably hadn’t helped his circumstances).
My goal: live at least as long as our most memorable neighbor, Fred Moore. As the inimitable Cliff Witmyer puts it, “Every day past 80 is extra credit.”
THE END
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] I can’t think of a profession other than law wherein the formal training leaves one less well prepared for the actual practice.
[2] Dad was on the scene. When Mother discovered the fire in full rage (a cleaning woman had left a box of hot ashes in the garage), she called the fire department, then Dad at his office, just two blocks from the fire department. He dashed down to his car and drove straight to the fire department, thinking he’d follow the trucks to our house. To his shock and dismay, however, after crossing the Rum River bridge just beyond the City Hall/Police/Fire complex, the trucks kept going straight out into the countryside. Dad blasted them with his car horn, but they were making to much of their own noise to hear Dad’s. He then pulled out to pass the trailing truck to get the driver’s attention. He finally managed to do so without driving out of control. The trucks then slowed, turned around and followed Dad home—to the fire. Meanwhile, Mother, my sisters and I had gathered in Moores’ kitchen with Ruth, where through the window we had a good view of the trucks and firemen as they put out the blaze.
