It Takes A Mad Dog

I was in my 1L year of law school.  That infamous “boot camp” year where the professors show no mercy, and the workload--the sheer amount of reading and briefing required--never ends.   Each day, I had to be prepared to hear the words “Ms. Keener, please rise.”  It meant I would have to stand and discuss whatever topic was at issue. 
Discuss is a kind word.  That first year, it was the professors’ job to point out the weaknesses of my analysis.  Their job to frustrate my arguments, to make me reconsider all the conclusions I had carefully prepared the night before.  The only way to escape humiliation, the only way to satisfy their questions, and perhaps even earn the rare Good job was to do my homework.  Be prepared.  Know those cases cold.
 But then there was a night, halfway into my first semester.  I sat before a stack of law books, hours of homework before me, and I could not bring myself to open them.  I wanted to be a lawyer.  I wanted to do well in school.  But at that moment, I needed something else.  I grabbed Wuthering Heights off the bookshelf, shut myself in the bathroom, sank to the floor and escaped with Heathcliff.
It was the first time since school began, that I had read anything other than casebooks.  Sitting on that bathroom floor, I realized how much I was missing.  I wanted to fall in love with new characters. I wanted to be outraged, to hope for mercy, to wait for something beautiful to be revealed.  Things like that were not inside my Contracts book. 
There are certainly some wonderfully written cases, cases that transcend boundaries and unlock new freedoms (these are the cases, after all, that inspire lawyers to become lawyers in the first place.)  But the majority of my 1L experience involved trying to understand Civil Procedure, and cringing when my professor for that class--who thoroughly enjoyed his student given nickname Mad Dog--went a bit rabid if someone proved unprepared. 
  I never finished that round of Wuthering Heights.  My husband pulled me from the bathroom, passed me his notes on the cases.  I went back to work, but it didn’t leave, that hunger for something different. 
 There was no time for novels.  So I began to write my own words, secretly, during class.  Maybe just a sentence.  About how the mountains look like giant hills.  Maybe just a poem.  About what it would feel like to have a baby nestled within. 
 With my 1L year behind me, the workload either decreased or just became less of a shock.  But still I wrote, and eventually, it began to take shape.  No longer random sentences, it became clear that I was writing something.  One day, I wrote an entire chapter.  In Mad Dog’s class!  Fortunately, my husband is an excellent note taker.  And he had a knack for kicking me under the table whenever I was lost on Crooktop, typing too furiously when the professor wasn’t talking. 
By the time I graduated, the bones of The Killing Tree were complete.  Who knows whether it would have been written, if my stack of law books had satisfied me, or if I hadn’t of allowed myself ten minutes in the bathroom with Heathcliff, five minutes during class to scribble just one decent line. 
 Changes would be made, but the heart of the story was there.  It’s pulse, first found, inside the walls of a law school classroom.  Sometimes it takes a bully to make you brave.  Sometimes it takes a Mad Dog to make you run—or in my case, sneak---in the other direction.  And find the place you were meant to be.