This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 17, 2009
My friend Cheryl has this theory about the universe.
Cheryl, who close friends refer to as The Wise Woman of West Vincent, frankly, has a lot of theories about a lot of things, including, for example, but not limited to, the restorative benefits of black and white commercial television circa 1967, and I am glad she does. Generally having her around relieves me of having to develop my own theories about the universe.
My feelings about Cheryl’s theories are similar to a relationship I heard that developed between the writer Calvin Trillin and his beloved late wife, Alice. In their marriage, she took responsibility for keeping on top of certain world current events, such as the war in the Middle East or monsoons in Bangaladesh, allowing him the freedom to concentrate more on finding a very good bagel shop in East Lansing, Mich. With Cheryl, she’s got the spiritual nature of the universe covered while I’m free to focus my attention on getting a nice cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream at Penn’s Table.
Cheryl’s theory about the universe goes something like this: If you have question about something, you just pose it in your mind, wait awhile, and the answer will eventually come to you out of nowhere. The universe will deliver it, free of charge.
If you wonder, for instance, how Indian children can eat the sort of spicy food that you can’t get your 8-year-old to swallow at gunpoint, at some juncture you are going to turn on the radio and some author from Mombai will be telling an NPR host how she used to train herself to eat cayenne pepper curry when she was 4 so she’d be ready for the “adult food.”
Her husband, Jamie, refers to this theory as “interconnectedness,” and has developed his own corollary that sort of goes like this: if something cross your mind for no particular reason, someone else is going to mention the same thing to you without you asking. You’re going to remember a night you spent in a fire house in Asa, Oklahoma, and two minutes later the phone is going to ring and the sports editor of the Daily Oklahoman is going to be on the other end.
Now, the truth be told, I don’t hold with a lot of this “curve of binding energy” mumbo-jumbo stuff. I’m not a New Age, crystals and pyramids sort of guy. I’m actually an Old Age guy, who more or less believes that many of the answers to the world’s mysteries can be solved by ordering another cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream at Penn’s Table. But occasionally, I give in.
Case in point: I recently drove up Bell Tavern Road in East Caln on my way to Cheryl and her husband’s house for dinner, and passed by a unique street lamp along the side of the road. It reminded me of the gas lamps that lighted the street on which I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Quietly, I wondered if those lamps still existed, or had been replaced by some electric arc-light monstrosity such as the ones that illuminate my bedroom at night, free of charge, from the roof of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage. (Thanks, commissioners!)
Two days later, I opened a package that arrived from my aunt containing a book of photographs of Cincinnati, Ohio, that she had found at a library book sale in Lawrenceville, N.J., and thought to send to me. Leafing through its pages, I turned to a photo of one of those aforementioned gas lamps, framed in snow, with accompanying text that spelled out how residents of the neighborhood had fought for years to keep the lamps trimmed and burning in the face of increasing costs. And the more I looked at the photo, the more I recognized the scene –the very street that I grew up on.
An I sat on the edge of my bed and thought about those nights when I would sit in an old broken down Volkswagen Microbus my next-door neighbor’s father owned but didn’t drive, dreaming about the day that I would be old enough to drive a stick-shift car, my revelry illuminated by the glow from those gas lamps. And I wondered what had become of my neighbor, who had played in the street with my sisters as I sat in that bus, on those warm Cincinnati nights as the sun went down and the gas lamps lighted up.
And the next day I turned on the television and watched the movie star Sarah Jessica Parker describe her new “Lovely” perfume. And I thought, “Oh, so that’s what happened to her.”
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Paying Attention
This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 10, 2009
There are people in any community who go about their lives in a quiet fashion, ruffling no feathers and roiling no waters. They fly mostly under the radar, out of either conscious choice on their part or studied indifference on ours. They make a difference in the world, surely, but in a low-key, self-conscious manner. Like the fictional Willie Lowman in “Death of a Salesman,” when they are gone, perhaps we look about and wonder why we didn’t notice them before, and kick ourselves for not paying attention to their quiet contributions.
This isn’t about one of those people. It’ s about John J. Duffy.
I have not known John J. Duffy all my life, but there are times it feels like it. He is as much a part of the landscape of the Chester County I have come to know and appreciate, if not adore, as the clock tower on tip of his beloved courthouse or the waters of the Brandywine Creek. He is as noticeable and brash as the neckties he favors. Among the legal circle I associate myself with on a professional basis, there are few who do not, when you ask them, have a ready, distinct, certain opinion of John J. Duffy – good or not so good, affectionate or antagonistic.
That is to say, you may not like John J. Duffy, but you must acknowledge him. He is no shrinking violet, no silent witness, no unseen face. He is a criminal defense attorney and a proud, accomplished one, who has battled his way through countless trials and rubbed those across the aisle from him more than one wrong way over the years.
So the very fact that this coming week John J. Duffy will be called to stand and be honored by those people he has battled – judges and prosecutors, for starters – is remarkable. On Friday, the Chester County Drug Court will present John J. Duffy with its Osceola Wesley Award, given to a person who has aided in the recovery of people gripped by addictive demons. He does not want the award –there are between 11 and five other people, depending on who he’s telling, who deserve it more – but he’s getting it anyway and that’s a hell of a thing.
John J. Duffy is perhaps as well known for his battle against, and continuing triumph over, alcoholism, as for his courtroom skills. Years ago, researching his back-story for a piece I was putting together before one of his trials, I read all about it: the angry, booze-tinged fall from grace, much of it in the public eye, and then the eventual redemption. It made fascinating reading. Most of all, the tale demands wonder at what became of the John J. Duffy who was. Not content to keep his sobriety to himself, John J. Duffy has since his recovery gone on to share it with as many people as he can fit into a 24 hour day -- without ticking off the missus.
“John wears his recovery on his sleeve,” a woman who knows him well told me while we stood in a hallway of the Justice Center last week. If a ride to a meeting is needed, or a referral to his treasured Caron Foundation is required, or simply a person to stand by while the addiction is still holding sway is necessary, John J. Duffy has been available for countless lost souls, she said.
Judge William P. Mahon, the county’s recovery court champion, told me that John J. Duffy’s life and work in helping people regain their lives was nothing more than “extraordinary.” He said that John J. Duffy had gone out of his way to provide assistance for those in recovery, with no thought for himself.
Except once, the judge remembered.
When still in private practice, a client of Mahon's was facing his fourth DUI charge. Or was it his fifth? No matter, the man’s life was a wreck, careering out of control like the drunk driver he was. Sitting in court while Mahon asked a judge to continue the case so that everything could be tied together, John J. Duffy heard the story and approached. “I’m not trying to steal your client,” he told Mahon, “but tell him to call me.”
A year later Mahon attended his client’s 12-month sobriety anniversary. John J. Duffy had shepherded the man through the recovery process and helped negotiate his life back to a clean and straight course. In return, however, the client, a professional fitness trainer, helped John J. Duffy lose weight. And for a time, at least, John J. Duffy approached being svelte.
Osceola Wesley, the Coatesville man and recovered drug abuser for whom the award he will receive was named, came from a world different than John J. Duffy’s. North Philly versus West Philly; Army service in Korea versus law school at Villanova; African-American versus Irish American. But, as Mahon pointed out to me last week, their worlds converged around how they dealt with their addictions. “Both came out of those experiences determined to contribute back to the recovery of others,” he said.
Attention must be paid, someone once said. And so now it will be.
There are people in any community who go about their lives in a quiet fashion, ruffling no feathers and roiling no waters. They fly mostly under the radar, out of either conscious choice on their part or studied indifference on ours. They make a difference in the world, surely, but in a low-key, self-conscious manner. Like the fictional Willie Lowman in “Death of a Salesman,” when they are gone, perhaps we look about and wonder why we didn’t notice them before, and kick ourselves for not paying attention to their quiet contributions.
This isn’t about one of those people. It’ s about John J. Duffy.
I have not known John J. Duffy all my life, but there are times it feels like it. He is as much a part of the landscape of the Chester County I have come to know and appreciate, if not adore, as the clock tower on tip of his beloved courthouse or the waters of the Brandywine Creek. He is as noticeable and brash as the neckties he favors. Among the legal circle I associate myself with on a professional basis, there are few who do not, when you ask them, have a ready, distinct, certain opinion of John J. Duffy – good or not so good, affectionate or antagonistic.
That is to say, you may not like John J. Duffy, but you must acknowledge him. He is no shrinking violet, no silent witness, no unseen face. He is a criminal defense attorney and a proud, accomplished one, who has battled his way through countless trials and rubbed those across the aisle from him more than one wrong way over the years.
So the very fact that this coming week John J. Duffy will be called to stand and be honored by those people he has battled – judges and prosecutors, for starters – is remarkable. On Friday, the Chester County Drug Court will present John J. Duffy with its Osceola Wesley Award, given to a person who has aided in the recovery of people gripped by addictive demons. He does not want the award –there are between 11 and five other people, depending on who he’s telling, who deserve it more – but he’s getting it anyway and that’s a hell of a thing.
John J. Duffy is perhaps as well known for his battle against, and continuing triumph over, alcoholism, as for his courtroom skills. Years ago, researching his back-story for a piece I was putting together before one of his trials, I read all about it: the angry, booze-tinged fall from grace, much of it in the public eye, and then the eventual redemption. It made fascinating reading. Most of all, the tale demands wonder at what became of the John J. Duffy who was. Not content to keep his sobriety to himself, John J. Duffy has since his recovery gone on to share it with as many people as he can fit into a 24 hour day -- without ticking off the missus.
“John wears his recovery on his sleeve,” a woman who knows him well told me while we stood in a hallway of the Justice Center last week. If a ride to a meeting is needed, or a referral to his treasured Caron Foundation is required, or simply a person to stand by while the addiction is still holding sway is necessary, John J. Duffy has been available for countless lost souls, she said.
Judge William P. Mahon, the county’s recovery court champion, told me that John J. Duffy’s life and work in helping people regain their lives was nothing more than “extraordinary.” He said that John J. Duffy had gone out of his way to provide assistance for those in recovery, with no thought for himself.
Except once, the judge remembered.
When still in private practice, a client of Mahon's was facing his fourth DUI charge. Or was it his fifth? No matter, the man’s life was a wreck, careering out of control like the drunk driver he was. Sitting in court while Mahon asked a judge to continue the case so that everything could be tied together, John J. Duffy heard the story and approached. “I’m not trying to steal your client,” he told Mahon, “but tell him to call me.”
A year later Mahon attended his client’s 12-month sobriety anniversary. John J. Duffy had shepherded the man through the recovery process and helped negotiate his life back to a clean and straight course. In return, however, the client, a professional fitness trainer, helped John J. Duffy lose weight. And for a time, at least, John J. Duffy approached being svelte.
Osceola Wesley, the Coatesville man and recovered drug abuser for whom the award he will receive was named, came from a world different than John J. Duffy’s. North Philly versus West Philly; Army service in Korea versus law school at Villanova; African-American versus Irish American. But, as Mahon pointed out to me last week, their worlds converged around how they dealt with their addictions. “Both came out of those experiences determined to contribute back to the recovery of others,” he said.
Attention must be paid, someone once said. And so now it will be.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
