PARTING THOUGHTS A Jealous Mistress By Patric Doherty 62 OREGON STATE BAR BULLETIN • JUNE 2016 iStock A fter driving through seven states over three days in a 1960 VW bus, Joe and I were happy to at last chug in to South Bend, Indiana. It was a bright Saturday morning in September, 1967. The air smelled of autumn and the trees were turning bright hues of red and yellow. Our final destination was Notre Dame Law School, where we had been accepted for three years of intense legal training in an environment of extreme social depri- vation, South Bend itself. Joe was a fraternity brother at Univer- sity of Oregon and fresh out of Vietnam. An officer, his speech was still sprinkled with the argot of the military. Yes, ma’am. No, sir. Roger that. 10-4. Copy that. As we drove into the city, a beat-up car passed us at high speed, weaving and swerving in and out of its lane. Joe cried, “Dort, look, there’s a drunk driver! Shall we make a citizen’s arrest?” I said, “Are you crazy? We haven’t had one minute of law school! No way.” He grudgingly agreed. We let the “drunk driver” careen away, and headed to the law school. Even though it was a Satur- day, the administrative office was open. A pleasant, matronly staff woman greeted us and gave us our orientation materials. Then she asked if we’d like to meet the dean, who was working in his upstairs office. Of course we had to say yes, so upstairs we went. The dean’s huge office resembled a Gothic cathedral, with vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows and bookshelves crammed to the top with legal tomes. A massive mahogany desk was the room’s centerpiece. The woman made introductions to no one that we could see. Eventually a form began taking shape from behind the desk. A wizened, sharp-featured face with a shock of white hair slowly became vis- ible as the dean rose to his full height of 5 feet, 1 inch to greet us. He resembled an ancient leprechaun. He was polite but old-school. No small talk. After a 10-minute interview, mostly questions about far-away Oregon, he ended the audience with the following desk-thumping advice: “Work! Work! Work! Six days a week. Then take one day off. You will come to find, gentlemen, that the law is a jealous mistress but” — he paused for dramatic effect, waggling a bony finger at us — “a very satisfying one.” Work, work and work we did. A regi- men of Contracts, Torts, Agency, Real Property and Common Law was our steady diet for the whole semester, made bearable only by “Fighting Irish” football every Saturday. The games were our escapes into nor- malcy, if only for one afternoon. Most always we won, with Touchdown Jesus offering his benedictions from the school library building. The marching band’s in- cessant playing of “Wake Up the Echoes” added to the post-game euphoria. Finals week came in December. The first four exams I handled without un- due incident. The last was Common Law, taught by an egghead professor who was hopelessly abstruse in his teaching methods. I wrote steadily, one leg crossed over the other, for two hours. No idea if I’d aced it, or flunked it. When I got up from my chair to turn in my exam paper, I noticed that my right foot would not flex. It would flop down, but would not come back up to its normal posi- tion. There was no pain or tingling. It had not fallen asleep. I just couldn’t raise it. Well, I thought, just an overnight problem. Wrong. I flew to Portland for Christmas break. Three days later, my parents took me to an orthopedic surgeon who said he hadn’t seen anything like it in his 40 years of practice. Femoral nerve damage from sitting with my leg crossed for two hours, he said. It will come back over time. Be patient. So back I went to Notre Dame wear- ing a special shoe, a spring-loaded wing- tip to keep my foot from dropping, and a brace to wear at night to keep my Achilles tendon from shrinking. I sought out the professor in question and said, “Look what happened to me when I took your final!” He said, laugh- ing, “Well, my exams have caused a lot of mental damage, but I’ve never seen any physical damage until now!” Well, funny for him, maybe, but not for me. The “drop foot” lasted six more months. In the meantime, I coped with wingtip and brace. I went on to practice law for 36 years. During that time, through the various ups and downs each of us has experienced, I kept waiting for the “very satisfying” part of the dean’s mantra about the “jealous mistress” to kick in. And kept waiting, and kept waiting … Patric Doherty is a former Portland-area lawyer who has turned to freelance writing.