Page 268 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
the color of blood by living in a home that contained a doctor’s office hard by the Ocean Avenue trolley tracks, by sitting on iron picket fences, and by doing show-and-tell experiments; although I liked the idea of teaching, there was no field that I felt strongly about, and I suspect that being a less-than-diligent student might have made me think better of being a teacher; having grown up in a neighborhood where every- body—make that every man—was a professional of some sort, I had exactly no idea that there was a corporate or otherwise capitalist world out there; I wasn’t a painter, sculptor, musician, poet, or writer (or didn’t think that I could make a living as one); and I suppose that I basically lacked imagination.
On the other hand, there had been signs from early on that I was bound to try the legal life: Even though I lost every debate at home, there was a plenitude of verbal sparring, and my mother had clearly honed my skills at argumentation; the fact that my father would speak without ever uttering a proper noun when a pronoun would suffice had made me a closer listener (and potentially a good draftsman); I had answered the call to politics in the seventh grade and again in high school (class president at 193 or recording secretary at Phi Gam don’t exactly count as political positions); my Amherst interview with Profes- sor Ziegler was all about the jury system and the legality of euthanasia; and I had taken and liked Professor Latham’s Constitutional Law course. (As it happens, many years later, when I was probably questioning my decision, I retrieved my application to Amherst and found—to my sur- prise—that, when I had filled it out, I had clearly announced an intention to become an attorney.)
So it was that I practiced not extending my right hand to shake hands with Dean Tate, the admissions officer of Yale Law School, who had a paralyzed right arm. Tate had traveled to Amherst, and I joined about twenty other seniors who had gathered to hear him discuss what Yale was looking for in its applicants. He could have saved himself the trip; all he did, after engaging in some polite and irrelevant chatter, was to turn to a blackboard and write 4, 87, and 790 on it, or numbers quite close to those. The 4 stood for the maximum number of Amherst admis-
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