Sweet Relief
The courtroom smelled like an empty plastic container after the lid had been popped. Beams of sunlight bounced off cherry-lacquered walls through tall skinny windows rimmed with beveled glass creating the illusion of an outdoor thaw. Even though ice had blanketed the city overnight—enough so that schools were canceled—jury selection would not be delayed. People in everything from three-piece suits to lululemon to trapper hats and overalls, milled around like maggots inside the mahogany vaulted space. Late arrivers bled out the door into the hall.
Photo: Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress. Digitally enhanced by Rawpixel. Public Domain (CC0).
A constitutional duty to uphold a constitutional right had convened the disparate collection. The strangers sat, without speaking, scrunched on pews protected from their neighbors by moats of winter regalia. The room throbbed with pregnant dread.
Then, just like in movies, a door creaked breaking the anxious silence and in clip-clopped a (supposedly) high-ranking official, the precursor for the black-robed one who would follow. The one who would explain the vetting process and reveal the improbable conglomeration’s fate.
Though he talked too much, the honorable one tried to set the stage for what was rinse-and-repeat for him but foreign tangles to those summoned to attend. He played with humor woven through a list of wheres and whys and whats and hows, then began the round roll call. It was the anti-lottery process. If you heard your name you got to leave, if you didn’t hear your name you stayed in the jury game.
In times of stress it’s tricky to decipher what that means.
Those who remained anonymous in the room were “the chosen.” The brass ring was a move to a waiting area to find out more about the case they had been hand-selected to hear. Some potential jurors pulled out snack bags as if they had known they were going to be surrounded in high-gloss cherry stain for days. Others brought books and buried their faces there. One silver-haired woman looked instantly at home clickety-knitting while apologizing as her balls of yarn rolled across the marble floor. First-timers sat and stared. Where are the bathrooms? How long do we stay here? Do we get a break for lunch? I didn’t know we started today! Unspoken questions bounced around the poorly lit corridor like pinballs without a trough.
Then out of nowhere, an authoritative voice coming from the four-way intersection of the halls announced, “Looks like we won’t be needing you after all. Thank you for your ‘almost service.’” He paused to let his levity land. “Our case is being settled out of court. We appreciate your time and your patience, and . . . (after an awkward silence teetering between an apology and a get out of jail free card), “You may go!” Then he raised his arms as if they were two goal posts in a universal stance of victory.
Chatter filled the chamber the way it does a sanctuary after the final “Amen.”
“That elevator takes forever!” a young man in an olive goose down jacket exclaimed as the masses followed him like a herd of sheep hungry for a leader.
A human tsunami bubbled toward the stairwell.
“My kids are gonna be stoked—”
“I just text my wife to pick me up at five--” a glass half-empty suit-and-tie bemoaned.
“The government just wasted my morning—”
“I saw you knitting. Workin’ on a Christmas gift?”
“Will you go back to work or are you taking the day?”
“I was kinda looking forward to a good who-done-it--”
Comments on the verge of conversations crisscrossed in the descending serpentine shaft.
“How do they just come to a settlement at the ninth hour like that?” a frumpy woman asked no one in particular as she chased her dangling purple scarf while making the stairstep turn.
Responses to her rhetorical ricocheted off the concrete walls.
“Lawyers make their bluff….”
“Then other lawyers make a deal . . .”
“You know what they say about lawyers and lakes…”
Laughter erupted as the child-like gaggle brushing shoulders down the flights of stairs became fast friends.
The sacred sound of sweet relief.