As part of my goodbye to blogging without consequence, I'm going to do a three-part bit about the chip on my goddamned shoulder, and how spite, and nothing but spite, has driven me to become a lawyer.

In the winter of 2000/2001, my dad was leaving a lunch meeting in Downtown Boston. It was a slightly warmer day, after a series of very cold days. If you remember this winter in Boston, you remember that we had a series of snow storms and ice storms in close succession. Instead of snow and slush, we had layers of hardened ice sandwiched between crunchy crystalline snow, everywhere.

As he exited the building, a block of ice, weighing around a hundred pounds, slid off the roof onto my father's head.  It split his scalp and dropped him like a rock. His coat was ruined and he was unconscious for several minutes. An ambulance took him to Mass General.

He's never been the same since. His memory is crap, and he's easily irritated because of it. He's lost a lot of hearing, which bothers him a lot, because he loves music. The impact of the ice, and the fall, exacerbated pre-existing damage to his joints, making his life miserable. Within a few years after the accident, he couldn't walk long enough to fly into certain airports - a problem for someone whose business depended on his presence on job sites around the country.  He's since had to have his right knee replaced, an extraordinarily painful operation with dissappointing results. He's a drummer, or would have been in a time of wishes-for-horses; the pain in his ankles and shoulders  keeps him from drumming for very long, now. He's limited to a song, or a song and a half. 

My father's business is facilities design and engineering. I can't bring him anywhere without hearing about OSHA violations. Seriously. My father can spot an improperly ventilated work area from a mile away; knows the legal tolerances for certain chemicals to the parts per million. 

(Imagine my adolescence, for a moment. Hobotheawkwardadolescent is painting her fingernails black, in the family room. Her father comes in. All of a sudden, the rant begins. Toluene! Formaldehyde, etc. Removing polish was even worse. To this day, I instinctively hide any acetone-containing nailpolish removers - as if OSHA is about to bust into my apartment and shut it down as an unsafe workplace.)

So I know that if the unconsciousness did NOT immediately follow the impact - if there was even a milisecond to consider what was happening, my father's mind immediately turned to WHY the ice fell from the roof. Before the wound even started to bleed, my dad would have recalled any requirements that pitched roofs over a certain height in certain climates should really have those little pokey things (sorry, I'm not my dad - I know there are names for them) that make sure that ice does NOT fall in sheets, but is broken up before it can hit the ground.

To an engineer (which my dad is not, but can certainly fake being, in a pinch), this situation is infuriating. 

To a law student, this situation is the rarest of rare negligence fact patterns: res ipsa loquitur. The thing speaks for itself. Meaning - this type of accident can only happen when somone has fucked up. If the roof had had the proper mechanisms to break up the ice, he'd have never been hit by a chunk large enough to knock him out. 

 My father did not sue. 

He did end up mentioning the situation to the lawyer (schmuck-asshole-fucktard) who represented his company in transactions and contracts and things like that. I actually could go into the story of how the shmucky asshole real estate lawyer dissuaded my father from suing, or even submitting a claim to the building owner's insurer - but the gross incompetence and irresponsibility of that lawyer in begging to take a case in a field were he didn't have the experience or knowledge, or even the ambition to become remotely competent...isn't relevent here.

What's relevent is that the bad attorney told my father that the building owner offered to pay for the hospital visit (as far as it wasn't covered by the deductible) and the coat, in return for a release. What's relevent is that, instead of my father -a large, angry, intelligent, bulldog of a man, an actual, literal killer, and an ex-marine, a bootstraps and fingernails type of guy - telling Schmucko, Esquire, that that was absurd, and getting a new attorney - my dad said:

 "O.K., Thanks. I appreciate it."

My dad is from Dorchester. He grew up in a series of triple-deckers. He dropped out of high school after his second sophomore year, so he could get a job and keep his mother's rent paid and his brother's stomach full. He worked at a gas station, he stole some, he was a bit of muscle here and there, he played guitar at bars, drove an illegal cab. 

 When he was nineteen or twenty, he was sitting on a bus when a retarded man got on. The man asked the driver a question; the bus driver went on to humiliate, berate, and terrify the man. The door was closed behind him, and the man couldn't leave. My father has never had a tolerance for bullies. 

My father took the bus driver out of his seat, opened the door, let the man out, threw the bus driver from the bus, followed him onto the sidewalk, picked him up by the neck, and pinned him against the bus with one hand, by the throat, crushing his windpipe. The busdriver died. 

Somehow -and I still don't understand how this could have happened- a judge gave my father the choice: jail or the marines. My father went into the marines. This was during the vietnam war.

When he got out of the marines, he went to work in a shipyard in the town I grew up in. He welded, I think, although I may be wrong. Somehow, through the shipyard, there was an opportunity to take drafting classes. He did. Became an assistant draftsman instead of a welder - continued taking drafting classes, eventually worked for a defense contractor drawing up blueprints for desalinization. Step by step he worked up, from copying drawings to correcting them, from correcting them to making them, from blueprints to autoCAD, to designing clean rooms and process facilities for pharmaceauticals and biopharm. Not bad at all.

Around the time I started school, he grabbed onto the middle class with both hands, never to let go. I grew up in a family of clipped coupons, savings accounts, and annual birthday parties. I'm amazed by my father, and what he's accomplished. The older I get, though, the more I think that Imay be just beginning to understand him.