Aunts, The Courts, Thanksgiving

I haven't seen my Aunts Pat and Eileen since Sistatime!'s wedding, which was 7 years ago. And you know how that turned out. (I can joke about it because everytime she tries to guilt me into doing something, Sistatime! always signs off as "your cancer-surviving, divorced-before 30 years old little sister. Whose cat has seizures.") So I was pretty excited a coupla weeks ago when Brothatime!! told me that the aunts were coming down to his his house for Thanksgiving dinner; I was looking forward to a coupla days of laughing my head off at their outrageous, bordering on the cartoonish "is this a put-on? surely they cannot be serious, right?" Boston accents hearing their stories of growing up in Lowell, Mass in the 1950s.

But then I got a call from Brothatime!!, and it turns out that while Aunt Eileen is coming, Aunt Pat has found herself tied up with jury duty and will NOT be coming. First of all, we were all stunned - these are two women who lived together with their mother until they hit about 65, so one of them traveling without the other to an Arby's, much less another state, was a day nobody thought would ever come. Sure they put a man on the moon, but one of my aunts on a plane without the other one? Now THAT'S hard to believe. So Brothatime!! tells me to call Aunt Pat and do some sweet-talking to get her to change her mind about not coming - that's how it is in our family; he's the one with an outrageously successful career and loving family, and I'm the one who is good at talking to old ladies on the phone.  Hey, no small roles other than being the one who is good at talking to old ladies on the phone in this family, we all play a part! And the whole thing from her side seems absurd in the first place since, you would think, the federal courts of all places would NOT be working on, you know....THANKSGIVING. What the fuck, I'm thinking, is she on the OJ jury, sequestered at some Super 8 somewhere? "AUNT PAT!!!! That ended in 1995, you can leave!!!!!!!!" (I ain't gonna be the one to tell her what the verdict was, she can read Entertainment Weekly like everybody else.)

So I call Aunt Eileen, since of course nobody else seems to have Aunt Pat's number as the last time she gave her digits out it was to fucking Fabian and, after the  first 12 minutes first few seconds it took her to realize it was me and not Brothatime!!, we chatted for a bit and then I asked her about Aunt Pat, and she told me the same thing Brothatime!! had already told me. THEN it turns out, as Eileen casually mentions to me, Pat hasn't even fucking been SELECTED to be on the jury, she's just been one out of about 300 people who have been asked to appear for jury selection!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  And she here thinks that this means she won't be able to leave town even Wed-Sun of THANKSGIVING WEEKEND, when yes, I'm sure the courts are chock-filled with cases!!!!

This whole thing coincides with my watching, as I mentioned earlier, A Time to Kill for the 40000th time. As I was watching I went back to the same thing I've posted somewhere on these pages before, and something I think about every time I see a courtroom scene in a movie or on tv: how can the scales of justice in the end be tipped one way or the other by, as the old joke goes, people who aren't smart enough to get out of jury duty? I mean, someone studies the law for a coupla years, spend years working obsessively under the best attorney they can find, then spends years honing their legal and courtroom skills all so that their livelihoods, as well as the life of whom they're defending, can be decided by 12 people who struggle to stay awake while nodding their heads to legal-ese they do not understand. This doesn't happen in any other field, does it?

"Okay nurse, all that's left is to take the donor vessel and anastomose it to the right coronary artery..."
"Doctor, you're amazing, 14 hours of surgery!"
"Well, if we can pull this off, he will live. If not..."
"That would be awful. He has a family!"
"SO! Who do we have today?"
"This is Nicky, she's 24, and she bedazzles handbags."
"I can't BELIEVE I gotta take off work for this shit!!!"
"Good luck, Nicky!" (doc peels off gloves, grabs putter and leaves the operating room)

Right? And yet here we are with a legal system wherein justice lies in the hands of a 70 year-old woman who thinks they will be "jurying" through Thanksgiving (along with her sister, who didn't seem surprised at all this or even remotely think it odd.)

Gavel?(bang!!!!!)