Thursday, April 28, 2011

The Good Fight.

I think that most of you know what I do for a living but, for those who don't, I'm a lawyer and I keep sexually violent predators away from the community. And I LOVE my job.

Work has been so crazy busy lately that I've lost track of lots of other things - like blogging, for instance. I usually do that late at night when I can sit down and dedicate some time to it. But, lately, I've been working on one work project or another from early evening until the wee hours of the morning so I just haven't had much time for anything else. It's been very tiring. And, even though I love my job and am happy to sacrifice my time to fight the good fight, I've been SO ready to get back to my life!!

I had a trial against a pedophile this week and it went pretty quickly. I was planning to go home and celebrate my win - and the break in my busy schedule - by staring blankly at the walls, just because I could. But my sister Tammy needed me to watch her kiddos because she had forgotten that she and her husband had tickets to a play downtown. So I picked my nephew Ben up and took him with me to go pick my niece Emma up from her ballet class. While we were driving to get Emma, one of my friends from work called me to see how my trial had gone. Since I had Ben in the car, I didn't talk about any of the details of the case - he and my nieces know that I deal with "bad guys" but that's the extent of their knowledge about what I do and I intend to keep it that way.

But Ben wanted information. And as soon as I got off the phone, he was asking me questions:

Me: [to friend on phone] Okay - thanks for calling. See you tomorrow! [hang up]
Ben: What did the bad guy do, Catchy?
Me: [oh boy] He was just a really bad guy.
Ben: But what did he do?
Me: Well, he was just a REALLY bad guy.
Ben: Yeah, but what did he dooooooo?
Me: [wow, he's a persistent little . . .] Well . . . [how do I answer this??] . . . he was mean to kids.
Ben: [gasp] REALLY??
Me: Yeah. Can you BELIEVE that?
Ben: [shaking his head in disbelief] No . . .
Me: Me, either.
Ben: What did he do to the kids?
Me: [oh crap] Ummmmm . . . well, he was just really mean to them.
Ben: He WAS??
Me: Yep. Isn't that SO bad?
Ben: Yeah. But what did he do? Was he like [scrunches up his face into a mean face and using his meanest voice] "Hey, kids! Get back inside!"?
Me: Yes! Wasn't that AWFUL??
Ben: [jaw dropped, shocked that such depravity might exist in the world] Yeah. It is, Catchy.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand THAT'S why I do my job, right there - to protect that kind of innocence. And I wouldn't trade it for the world.

But, seriously - these pervs need to stop interfering with my dang blog . . .

3 comments:

Erin Faseler said...

I love this blog entry!! Thanks, Ben! I think I'm going to print it out and put it on my office wall so I can look at it and smile when I'm dealing with a really AWFUL perv!! SPU Erin

Anne said...

I always happen to catch your blog when you write about conversations with Ben in the car. (Okay, or when you're extracting complex legal concepts from beloved Christmas carols, but I digress.) I love this, and I love the courage and hootzpa (Yiddish spell check please?) you have to fight the good fight.

Tam said...

Love it! Always love the banter with your people but, this was perfect. Also, what tha heck. Next time hijack the little debbie truck. I'm sure you have friends in high places! We could have had so much fun with that. Oh great, now I'm drooling for a peanut butter log or a star crunch.