One Fine Day
In 1963 the Chiffons came out with their version of the Carol King song, One Fine Day. In 1996, what have become two of the most iconic stars of the big screen, George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer, made a movie with the same name and which used the Chiffon’s recording as it’s theme song. In the movie, two single parents with one young child apiece and struggling careers, spend a day chasing their tails and their kids around New York. What starts as an abrasive relationship between the two parents develops over the day into an affection that we are left to assume develops from there. The whole movie takes place in one day in New York City and it resolves every loose end in these two peoples’ lives, which is what makes it one fine day.
Today was one fine day for me. I don’t look like George Clooney and I don’t need Michelle Pfeiffer in my life, as fine an actress and woman as she is. I have Kim in my life and there isn’t an actress on earth (not even Elisabeth Shue…my favorite) who can hold a candle to my Kim. When Kim and I joke around about a celebrity “hall pass” for each of us, I always pick Elisabeth Shue. I’m not talking about the Karate Kid Elisabeth Shue, but more the Leaving Las Vegas Elisabeth Shue. And for her choice, for some reason that has always been beyond my comprehension, Kim always chooses Ed Harris. I’m guessing she’s talking more about The Right Stuff Ed Harris rather than the Top Gun: Maverick Ed Harris. I grant you that at age 60, Shue is no spring chicken or even the babysitter she once played, but Harris has thinned out to be that Crassus-like figure that has a lean and hungry look that only Shakespeare could love. And that’s the thing, I suppose as we get older we could choose to update our “hall passes”, but that seems very disloyal. Why should we be allowed to age gracefully and yet our heroes not be afforded the same respect? But my fine day had nothing to do with Clooney, Pfeiffer, Shue or Harris. But it did have everything to do with Kim since I thank my lucky stars every day that I met Kim eighteen years ago by chance via match.com and that she found me worthy enough to get to know better. I, for one, made up my mind about Kim on that first night in June and everything since then has been one fine day for me after another.
For the first time in the week since we returned from the Middle East, Kim and I woke up in the same bed (we had been isolating due to my COVID infection, which is now past). It was 7am, which is late rising for us even though the recent daylight savings change keeps things pretty dark before that. But it was a morning when neither of us had any pressing appointments or obligations until a joint training session at 11am (that is far more unusual than it sounds since lifting weights has never been something I like to do). As I lifted the blinds, the filtered light of dawn started to come through the Queensland Bottle Tree on the patio and the low-lying clouds to the East. Since returning to our hilltop, we haven’t seen much of the sun, which is distinctly not what we are used to here in San Diego. But this year, due to the twelve atmospheric rivers that have visited California from the North Pacific, bringing much-needed rain to our drought-stricken state, it has been raining or cloudy almost every day for the past 70 or so days. That is almost 20% of the year and well above the average 21 days of precipitation we usually get in this county in a normal year. Every day for a week, I have been hoping for a little sun and have come up empty-handed.
But not today, today was one fine sunny day. It is amazing how much that can change your disposition and energy level. Everything suddenly looks brighter even though the temperature was not yet into the traditional warm zone, but sometimes all it takes is a little sunshine. I listened to the news reports on the kitchen TV and found that the legal pundits are all predicting the first indictment on former president Donald J. Trump in the early part of next week. And then I read that Ron DeSantis is repeatedly stubbing his political toe, most recently over a crass and bizarre event of having been caught eating chocolate pudding with three fingers and being accused of being a lout. I generally make it a habit not to find pleasure in the bad fortune of others, but I cannot deny that there is something satisfying hearing that it seems no one in the country is ultimately above the law or common decency standards, even if it took a long time to find its way to their door and may not stick like glue to either of them. At the gym I muscled my way through our Perfect Workout, as it is called, for the required twenty minutes and was reminded that Kim always says we can do anything for twenty minutes…and she’s tight about that…except maybe hold our breath, which is what I do every day now, politically speaking.
Back on the hilltop, I went back to the gardening chores and taking the motorcycles out to dust off their batteries after a month of idleness. It was then that I got a call from my expert witness partner from Palermo, where he lives. Damiano and I have become good friends over the past three years and we have done good business together on a dozen cases. He sends me a pistachio panettone every Christmas. He is one third of my firm’s ownership and I have a great deal of respect for the entire three-man team. They in turn have asked me to hold a master class on the subject of the expert witness process for all the new experts we have brought into the stable of late. They consider me the lead horse in their stable with the most experience at the business, so inadvertently I have become the expert at being an expert witness and thus, according to them, worthy of giving a master class on the subject. To be precise, I will be holding several master classes on the topics that relate to all aspects of the process. They wanted me to do the first two next week and then I realized that I had been summoned for jury duty to possibly start next Friday, the day of the second of the planned classes. I went to the summons and found the online connection to the court. With one click of a button I managed to easily push the date for my duty out a few months. It was so easy that I almost couldn’t believe it. It’s always nice to be able to solve problems with a mouse click. That should have been a portend that it was a special day.
So, as to the call from Damiano, I had been wondering if I would get one of the payments this week on what is due me on any of the four cases I am actively working on. Damiano called to tell me that they had received payments on all four of my cases just that morning and that as an accommodation to me as their lead horse, he had authorized his finance team to pay me what I was due on all four cases today. That was quite a windfall which, while I know I would have been paid it all eventually, was a pleasant surprise to get all on one Friday when the sun had finally decided to shine. Yes, indeed, on all counts, this was one fine day.