Osler's Razor

On Friday, just before leaving DC for a few weeks in California and Hawaii, President Obama announced 95 sentence commutations.  When the news hit, I was at the new Surly Brewpub for  lunch with  two lifelong friends, Sleepy Walleye and his brother (shown above)-- it was SW's birthday, and we had special reason to celebrate his life.

My phone blew up with calls and messages. I sat in the car and took a deep breath. It is, I guess, like being 18 and getting an email that says "admission decision"-- just more important.  I knew that one of the 45 emails I had gotten in ten minutes would have a link to a list of those who had received clemency. I found it, and clicked.

I ran down the long list and my heart sank. Two of our clients at the Clemency Resource Center were a part of this set, but many people I have worked for were not. In fact, there are about 8,000 people, many with great equities for release, who have petitions pending but were not on that list.

Feeling overwhelmed, I checked again, looking at the A's and the B's and the F's and the L's. Their names were not there, all of them small-time long-ago drug dealers who have turned their lives around after a decade or more in prison. I drove back to work quietly, thinking about the list, the winners of the freedom lottery.

I had grading to do, but as I sat at my desk with the set of tests, I dreaded the phone ringing. It rang anyways. I looked at the screen and it said what I feared it would: "Unknown," which is how calls from prison always come up.  I let it ring once, twice, three times before pressing "answer."

And they did call. Not in anger, but in sadness. And each time I talked to them about what had happened, how I did not know how they picked the lucky ones.  They told me, in heavy voices, what they would miss: a son's graduation, the last days of a mother in fading health. And each time I hung up and sat in silence. When it got dark around four-thirty, I neglected to turn on my lights. Outside my window the city transformed in the dusk. There is a small hotel across the street. It bustled with activity as people returned from shopping. A man walked out and stepped into a cab, and it drove off taking him wherever he wanted to go. It looked effortless, normal.

In the shroud of quiet, I mourned. This can't be how the movie ends. There has to be more, in the months to come.

I guess that sometimes that is Advent, too. The time is not yet here, and may never come.