Osler's Razor

Once again, I'm going to recommend going over to my Dad's blog and reading his reflections today. You can link to that here.

He covers a lot of ground. Eventually, he gets around to talking about the Famous Coachman, my favorite radio personality in Detroit, who had an overnight blues show (and a little record shop). His show was awesome, especially the awkward 6 AM handoff to "Parenting Journal," after the Coachman had been up all night.  And he describes Representative John Conyers, who was a jazz fan. My dad's portrait of Conyers is above. I'll never forget walking through the Eastern Market with my dad and seeing the two of them talking and laughing-- mostly laughing.

But mostly, he talks about the Good Blues, which often gets to me this time of year. (I described it before here). He talked about it this way:

Jazz got embedded under my skin not because it made me joyously tap my foot to the beat. It was the jazz played in a minor key that made a shy teenager know that it was OK to have the blues. In high school I would sneak out with a friend and go to Klein’s Show Bar to catch the after hours jam where local and national jazz musicians would do battle over who had the greatest hurt and soul. They wailed and pleaded, the sounds were so sweet and powerful that they chased all the teenage angst from my body. Jazz in a minor key can be a bittersweet remedy for a broken spirit.

I had some of that yesterday. I spent a lot of my day working on a pro bono case (well, all of my cases are pro bono; I'm a pro bono lawyer) and it was getting me down. My client is a guy who was serving a very long term for a very small amount of crack. He was an intended beneficiary of the First Step Act, which made changes to the crack laws retroactive. However, his judge in the Eastern District of Kentucky never gave him the chance to petition for it-- he pre-emptively denied my client any relief before he had even submitted a petition! The judge was wrong on the law, and wrong on the procedure. Federal courts across the country have granted people just like my client a break under the First Step Act.

So, I was a little down as I worked. How can our system of justice be so cruel and wrong so often?

Then I got an email from my dad with a link to his blog, and saw the picture of John Conyers, and laughed as I remembered the day in the Eastern Market, and felt the Good Blues. It is a place of meaning and value. I am lucky to have them as the leaves turn brown and the wind picks up and a morning with my dad at the Eastern Market or an evening at a warm jazz club seems like a pretty good idea.