About a month ago, I reported for jury duty at the Kings County Supreme Court building in downtown Brooklyn. Unlike many in the jurors' hall that morning, I was glad to be there. The truth is that I had been looking for something to do.
Before I retired, I published, on the average, about four items a year - books, journal articles, chapters, and reviews - related to my field of expertise. After I retired, I worked on projects such as an account of my journey around the world by surface transportation and a description of a 19th-century celebrity's world lecture tour. My last post-retirement project, however, a history of twin disasters that befell New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century, fizzled. Although I had spent more years than I like to admit hunched over microfilm readers, ancient newspapers, and dusty folders, I had written an unsatisfactory book. But by then I was either unable or unwilling to rewrite my manuscript. It remains unfinished and I had found nothing to take its place.
So I was looking for a meaningful occupation, preferably another book project. But according to the author of Ecclesiastes, "there is no end to the making of books," and by now who needs more? It's a failure of imagination, I guess, that I haven't found another direction, another occupation, or even another topic about which to write, but I seem to have dried up. So I welcomed the call to jury duty and hoped I'd be empaneled for a case that lasts at least a month.
As I sat all morning waiting to be summoned to a panel, I imagined myself pondering the reliability of a witness. I pictured myself as Henry Fonda in "Twelve Angry Men," convincing my colleagues one by one that the defendant is not guilty. When we were dismissed for lunch, I still had not been called. But after lunch, a court clerk announced that since there were very few cases on the docket, we were all discharged, our duty completed, free to return to our normal pursuits. We would not be summoned again for at least eight years. We could expect a check in the mail for $40. It arrived last week. In the meantime, I had returned to my normal pursuit of looking for something to do.
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I had a similar experience a few years ago. I didn't like my job and was hoping for a break from it in the form of an interesting court case. I spent the afternoon chatting with a woman who had a lot on her plate; she didn't want to serve. We were the only two people left in the jury pool. They called her first, and made her the last juror on the panel.
ReplyDeleteIt was such a disappointment to me, and for her as well I imagine!
A nice anecdote: you wanted to serve and she didn't - yet another example of life's unfairness.
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