Quit Your Job


Dan Saelinger/Trunk Archive

Published in the April 2014 issue

I helped countless bank clients foreclose on thousands of people's houses during my thirty years as an attorney for the banks. It sounds like a confession, and maybe it is. I'm still not sure. The foreclosures were legal; the homeowners had defaulted. To my clients, I was a hero; to others, I was a villain. I honestly never really stopped to think who I thought I was. I was just the instrument the banks used to enforce their rights. That's what they preach in law school—you're a hired gun.

Back when I was fifteen, my father, a physician, asked me what I wanted to do with my life. "Be a songwriter, like Dylan," I said. I thought I had poetry and music in my soul, just like Dylan, but Dad encouraged me to hedge my bets, so I went to law school (guitar in tow). Then followed the aforementioned thirty years.

I sought to balance the karma of my day job by helping artists, mostly of the starving variety, resolve their legal matters, but I couldn't see making a living at it, and the banks kept sending me more cases. And money. I admit making decent money had become my Chinese finger trap. I was comfortable. Does that make me a villain?

Then, three years ago, my friend, novelist Charles McNair, and I were in a bar enjoying a beer when in walks this elegant woman, high cheekbones, dark hair. "That's Natasha Trethewey," Charles said, waving her down, "the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet." Today, Natasha is poet laureate of the United States. This was a serious poet with deep insights. I wanted to impress….

"What kind of law do you practice?" she graciously asked me a few minutes in.

"I represent banks," I said, my standard reply. Most folks were happy to leave it at that. Not Natasha.

"How do you sleep at night?" she asked, fixing me with her clear brown eyes.

I froze. The fact was I was sleeping just fine. I was a middle-aged guy, deep into a career, with a bad back, some pretty nice stuff, and a comfy job. But her words shook me. I was also miserable. Maybe Dad had been wrong. Maybe I had let myself get too comfortable.

It took two more years, and the loss of my wife and my sister, before I turned in the keys to my law partnership, including the company car, the health insurance, and the steady paycheck. I started up an entertainment-law practice, and I'm still writing songs. I recorded an album recently. It doesn't sound like Dylan, but it does sound like me.

We all have dreams and we all have what our lives turn out to be, complete with internal conflicts, mistakes, and lessons learned. I still don't know what I was for thirty years—hero, villain, someone in between—and I suspect a lot of my colleagues in the industry feel the same way. One lesson, though, stands out: Never underestimate the power of a poet.

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