Here's to Uncle Matt

Every Labor Day weekend, the extended family of my sister's husband has a huge reunion on the shores of Lake Michigan.  The event has claimed a sort of mythological status, like Woodstock or Burning Man.  While we have never attended, "Cousinorama" has a gravitational pull that brings my sister up from California every year.  And I mean every year.  Nor rain nor sleet, nor high-risk double pregnancy, nor super preemies nor, as we learned in 2011, law school.  Now, my sister isn't starting law school.  Her husband, Matt, is the one who recently started classes after two full decades working as an in-house paralegal for a software giant in San Fran. 

To put the Cousinorama pilgrimage positively, as my sister would encourage us to do, would be to say that she has a knack for adventure or that she relishes the quality time you can spend with your children while on a road trip.  Taking an infant to Italy?  Sign her up!  Strapping three kids under 4 in the van for a cross-country drive? She's all Griswold over it.  The more cramped, the better.  That's how memories are made.  And, well, that's one way we're different.  I don't really want to take my kids to the grocery store, much less on a plane.  For me, family traveling puts me in crisis mode, sustainable for only short bursts.  After the initial run, I end up alternating between manic, decisive, do-everything pack-mule crisis-mode DT and don't talk, don't move, certainly don't make eye contact, just breathe survival-mode DT.  Fun, huh, MT?

It's during those high-stress times that MT and I start to get worn down.  With our busy work schedules, even the daily routines get to be too much - the picking up, making dinner, doing the chores, all while figuratively and literally wrestling with our children to get them to go to bed so we can squeeze in another hour or two of work. 

In the last few weeks, amidst the pressures of our current schedules, I've found myself thinking about my sister's husband from time to time.  Some of it is related to how I recall law school and some of it is that coping mechanism for making it through the rough patches at home. 

Several times since Labor Day, my thoughts have vicariously drifted back to eleven years ago, when MT and I met at the start of law school, that intellectual smelting site.  We were both full of kinetic energy, anticipating what we knew was going to be three years of something between Hogwarts, Hell week and high school.  Now, looking back at our first day of class (MT and I had all of our first semester classes together, as we were part of the same 17-person small group), and our first year of law school, I can't believe how completely clueless we all were.  Clueless about the law, and kind of about life, too.  Somehow MT and I ended up making pretty good life choices, selecting clerkships, jobs, where to live, even without any idea what would end up being the most important things to us this many years later.  I think Uncle Matt is going to have a different experience.

Civil Procedure Day 1 for me and MT: Owen Fiss, one of the preeminent academicians of the last 50 years, a true giant cloaked in Warren Court mystique, began the class with an inspiring, carpe diem speech when he took the podium.  I remember that, as he shifted into the Socratic during that first day, he stumped the entire 60-person class with what I now think of as a rather silly-easy question.  He asked us how do you sue someone.  Silence.  No hands.  Just a room full of "Flick?  Flick who?"  Roughly 60 students, all of whom were intelligent and highly driven, not to mention prepared for class, and nothing.  And that's because there was no Uncle Matt in the class.  He could have jumped in and saved us from our collective awkward moment of ignorance. This is a fact: I learned more civil procedure from Matt than I ever did from Fiss.         

In fact, not only were there too few Uncle Matts in my classes, I think that there are far too few Uncle Matts in the world.  This is the coping mechanism part.  Seriously, who doesn't need this guy around?  You have to read halfway down to get to the lead about Matt, past all the gratitude journal stuff (also, if you click on the gratitude journal link, and scroll down a bit, you'll be rewarded with a big smiling David).  Mary Poppins, indeed!  Everything in that post is the truth, in fact, it's probably even watered down.  In our house we know that when Uncle Matt comes to visit, somehow, even with three kids of his own, our house ends up cleaner than before he came, there are more groceries (he packs a week's worth of food for the three hour plane ride so that from the moment he arrives, our fridge is magically stocked), we have more "time off" for luxurious things like working out and yoga, mealtimes become a snap, my fantasy football team inevitably improves, and everyone is generally in a good mood.  Even writing this blog made me go from resentful of MTs currently constant work load to feeling blessed and all good.  No wonder my sister thought of the gratitude journal.  The man is a gift and wholly underappreciated, even when he's being appreciated.

So, here's to Uncle Matt, a guy who is probably cleaning up after dinner, while reading to his oldest daughter, with a pod-cast of Nina Totenberg playing in his ear, and video highlights of Zinedane Zidane playing in an endless loop on his laptop, next to a case brief for his contracts class.