Mary T. Wagner

Running With Stilettos

The Last “Intake Monday”

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After eighteen years of spending all of my “working” Mondays in the intake branch of Wisconsin’s criminal court system, I had my last pedal-to-the-metal “intake Monday” yesterday. Retirement, complete with punch and cake and goodbye hugs, is just hours away. I would be lying if I didn’t say I felt quite…unmoored. It has been quite the amazing journey. Rather than having an “empty nest” at my own home, I suddenly feel like I am leaving a sheltering nest of my own. What a cosmic turnaround!

Last day in court for these shoes!

To mark the occasion, I wore one of my stalwart pairs of stiletto heels, pumps with a grey and white faux snakeskin pattern and an equally fake illusion of having more expensive “stacked” heels. After ten years, the shoes had become a little wobbly, and one of them occasionally squeaked as I walked. But they were like old friends, and a familiar sight in court.

Aunt Mary’s bracelet

The other thing I made sure to wear was the ornate carved silver bracelet that my godmother had given me at my law school graduation. She envisioned it as my “signature” piece of jewelry, something that would catch the light as I made theatrical hand gestures in court. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my wrists and hands were so tiny that if I made such a flourish, the bracelet would likely fly off my arm and clock someone on the side of the head. But for the last day, I wore it to honor her. She had been a trailblazing, world-traveling high school teacher, and had served as the inspiration for many, including myself.

My Aunt Mary

This becoming-a-lawyer thing was my second career…or my third, if you count the “soccer mom” years where I multi-tasked by writing magazine and newspaper articles while my youngest children were napping.

Who knew I’d go back to school!!

I was forty when I started law school as a part-time student, with four kids ranging from kindergarten to high school under the familial roof, and a life-long, bone-deep fear of public speaking. Only a year before I had spent several months in a body cast, the result of a horseback riding accident that left me with a broken back and a wake-up call to start heeding my “inner voice.”

Law School diploma day!!

Three and a half years later, I was getting sworn in as a newly minted attorney and soon found my dream job as a state prosecutor, working part-time handling everything from speeding tickets to appeals before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. I worked in an incredibly beautiful Art Deco courthouse on the shore of Lake Michigan, and always felt like I was working on the side of the angels, blessed to be charged with a job whose professional ethics literally required us to seek justice rather than just to win at any cost. Talk about being part of a real-life “Justice League”!

The Sheboygan County Courthouse

What an amazing Art Deco interior.

As the part-time prosecutor, I had few cases of my own that I followed from start to finish. Rather, I provided backup for the other full-time prosecutors, who were called to be in two places at once on a regular basis. Mondays in particular were top-heavy with cases as the attorney “on intake” spent the morning reviewing police reports and dictating criminal complaints for people who had committed felonies over the preceding weekend, and I furiously worked to get up to speed on a combination of pending cases and new “initial appearances” for folks who had been given misdemeanor citations and told to come back to face the music and their formal charges several weeks later. I describe it as “catch and release.”

My “Running with Stilettos” shoes.

And over time, I overcame the challenges of public speaking…and picked up the challenge of mastering life in high heels. I was a late bloomer when it came to this, way past the age of 40 when in a moment of weakness and curiosity and urged on by my younger daughter, I bought a pair of sling-back faux alligator brown stilettos. And then bright pink stilettos. And then plaid stilettos with little bows.  And then…you get the picture. I figure that after tomorrow, unless I’m giving a speech somewhere, I’ll be in flats for the rest of my life. No more the echoing snap of spike heels on a polished stone floor, announcing that trouble is just around the corner…and closing fast.

But that was just a bonus. More than the challenging and personally rewarding work, and the steadfast and wonderful people I worked with and the friendships that bloomed, and the closeness to the Lake Michigan shoreline that drew me to the water on so many lunch hours…the past eighteen years have also provided a solid anchor during tremendous personal storms.

My tenure at the job has seen me through the end of my marriage; the divorce; several serious health crises involving my kids; my own health setbacks; endless 240 miles loops of crisis management and medical response involving relatives in my home town of Chicago; the decline and deaths of my father and godmother; the wrenching move from my “empty nest” home of 32 years in the country to a place in the city close to my job; the whole “empty nest” thing at all; the passing of several beloved pets including the two horses I had loved and cared for since I was a teenager; and just this year the typhoon of chaos revolving around my 94 year old mother suffering a broken hip. Whether up or down, feeling depressed, exhausted, elated, triumphant, happy or some combination of all, I could count on the fact that every single Monday I had a seat in a courtroom and a job to do, frequently starting with the words “The State appears by…” It provided me with a routine, and a structure, and a set of familiar duties, and a specific place in the universe. And now, in less than a day, I will be casting off from this solid, secure dock and setting sail on unknown seas to a new stage of life and adventure.

It feels more than a little scary!

Perhaps I shouldn’t be quite as dramatic as all that. I still have the same children, the same friends, the same hobbies, the same inquisitive nature. Perhaps instead of looking back at the past eighteen years as a prosecutor with such a sense of wistfulness, I ought to look back at a few years before that, when I threw myself off the familiar path of journalism and with a “carpe diem” sense of destiny, took the plunge into law school.

Perhaps. All I know is, when I was starting to take things down from my office bulletin board this week, I not only uncovered photos of some treasured moments, I also found a pin that a friend had given me when I graduated from law school nearly twenty years earlier. I laughed when I studied it closely before packing it to bring home.  Right now, I can’t think of a better message to begin this new journey with!

My “Carpe Diem” bear!!

Priceless memories, fifty cents

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“Patrician” glass tumbler

I’ve started to cautiously embrace going to the occasional “estate sale” on a weekend for amusement and curiosity. Before I sold my empty nest and moved to where I work (cutting 300 commuting miles a week from my time behind the wheel) I used to ride shotgun once in a while with my friend Mary who sells buys and sells antiques. I was along mostly for the female bonding on a Friday morning, but every so often I’d pull a couple of dollars out of my wallet and buy something that struck my fancy. Like an old book, or a porcelain vase.

Since the move, I haven’t been on one of these excursions with her for more than two years. I just can’t bring myself to roll out of bed at five in the morning to feed the pets and and then drive fifty miles on one of my days off. I miss those excursions! But I also miss the sense of discovery and mystery they represent, and so lately I’ve started to visit estate sales on my own. Not looking for anything monumental, but I’m a sucker for a pretty ceramic bird.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I couldn’t have possibly foreseen the time-warp journey I took back to my own childhood in a stranger’s kitchen. There, on a formica kitchen counter, amid neatly organized stacks of cups and saucers and candy dishes and bowls, were a pair of vintage glass tumblers with a pattern I recognized instantly. For the record, the tumblers were made some time in the late 1950s or early 1960s by the Jeannette Glass Company which operated in Jeannette, Pennsylvania between 1887 and 1983. They sport a blue and white Roman frieze motif involving horses and chariots and attendants and the exotic aura of antiquity.

But for me, on so many levels, they were the absolute embodiment of my Aunt Mary.

Aunt Mary

My late godmother, Mary Therese Griffin, was the epitome of fearlessness. The middle daughter of three born to my Irish-born grandparents in Chicago, she never married at a time when most women’s lives were constrained by that modest convention, but instead devoted her life to teaching and learning and traveling the world. Modern European history was her specialty for most of her teaching career, and I certainly wish she was here today to give me her take on national and international politics! When she died, people who she had taught a half century earlier in grade school showed up at her wake to tell me how she had affected their lives and their career choices and their willingness to cross oceans in search of adventure.  Here’s a link to the obituary I wrote about her and her ripple effect on others.

For me, of course, the effects were far deeper. As I held one of the tumblers in my hand, I suddenly recalled how my aunt had the glass ice bucket with the same pattern of Roman chariots on her bedroom dresser. That’s where she tossed her spare pennies, and as a little girl, I played with those pennies as children do, stacking them over and over in little piles of copper. I remembered also how I used to play dress-up with the sweaters in her dresser drawers, and tried on her makeup as well. Unconstrained by the responsibilities of a spouse or children, she enjoyed shopping at stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller and Lord & Taylor, and her travels took her to Egypt, China, Russia, and all over Europe. The Parthenon. The Pyramids at Giza. The Great Wall of China. She’d been there, done that.

We did a great many things together, not the least of which was horseback riding, a shared passion. Museum-going was another, and we thought nothing of making weekend jaunts to New York and Washington D.C. and Pittsburgh to take in significant art exhibitions. When she “retired” from teaching, she swung right into a second career as a docent at various historic and artistic venues in Chicago, continuing to teach and to learn and to share her enthusiasm

And so I bought both of the tumblers, of course, for fifty cents apiece. And every day now, as I look at them, I remember my aunt, who never turned down a chance to travel, or to learn, or to enjoy a new adventure. I credit her with, among many inspiring things, the fact that I’ve always got a valid passport at hand, ready to cross the Atlantic at a moment’s notice should the opportunity arise. And when I look at that Roman frieze with its horses and chariots poised and ready to move forward, I think “how perfect” a memento…and a reminder to take the trip, eat the dessert, make the memory.

Take the shot

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I’ve been reminded lately that photography and life operate best with the same instructions, which are simply…take the shot.

This came to mind just this morning as I was taking Lucky for a walk before leaving for work. It’s been two years since we moved from 14 acres of woods and fields surrounded by more woods and fields, to the city of Sheboygan on the shore of Lake Michigan, and Lucky and I are both still adjusting. I’ve never been a “dog walking” person, since for decades all I did was shoo whatever family dog we had outside to the yard and wait for him to get bored and ask to come back inside. Now, city living demands regular walks on a leash, along with good manners and not chasing rabbits. And the fact that Lucky is large and mostly black demands that I tailor our routes on hot sunny days to whatever set of streets offer the maximum shade cover for our exercise.

One of these shady streets has taken us past a tall fence of weathered vertical wooden slats cleverly spaced and staggered for a good amount of air flow. The fence was covered with vines of delicate ivy, and I delighted in stopping and pulling out my iPhone on a regular basis to grab photo after photo as the tendrils reached and the leaves grew from tiny things barely the size of the nail on my pinkie finger to robust works of natural art, and the panorama changed from day to day.

A riot of ivy

Inch by inch…

No more. I realized today that the entire fence had been given over this year to a carpet-thick creep of vines with gigantic leaves that remind me of T-Rex footprints preserved in museum exhibits. The leaves all look the same. And their prodigious multitude ensures that not only is there no ivy to be seen, the entire fence has disappeared within its depths, like something in a Gothic horror story. I miss seeing the ivy. I miss the anticipation I felt walking by the fence after a few days absent, to see what delightful turns of growth had occurred when I wasn’t looking. And I’m damn glad I took the shots when I could.

The fleeting glory of ivy became apparent last fall when I thought I’d replicate a photo I’d taken a year before on the spur of the moment (and a U-turn later) of blood red vines spread like fingers across the painted brown brick of an abandoned pool hall. Nope, last fall Mother Nature was giving me no such second opportunity. I drove past the abandoned building over and over again as fall turned to winter, and found that the vines had simply withered and gone away. I was glad I took the shot.

Tenacity

And the same thing held true for a treasured tranquility zone in the town I left. With the 14 acres in my rear-view mirror but family matters still requiring my regular return, I had developed the habit—after  stressful visits—of stopping at a Culver’s custard shop, ordering a hot fudge sundae with pecans, and driving to a nearby park, where an isolated lagoon framed by tree-covered ridges formed in the Ice Age sat overseen by a giant weeping willow at water’s edge. Sometimes I’d sit in the delicate, weaving shade of the willow tree with my sundae, pondering the surface of the water. Other times I’d sit gazing at the entire tree from the shade of a skating shelter nearby. I took photos, of course, once I was done eating, and shared them on Facebook with friends and relatives. I was stunned when I showed up at the park a couple of months ago, radio playing, hot fudge sundae melting slightly, and pulled into my regular parking space only to find that the majestic willow tree had been cut to the ground. I have no idea why, and even if I did, it wouldn’t make me feel any less sad. I’m glad I took those shots when I did too.

Willow reflections

Spring!

What lies beneath

I hung one of them in an art show recently, and the comments people made warmed my heart. “So peaceful!” “Like Monet!” “What a sense of tranquility!” But I think what will really matter most to me is when I take the print home, and hang it either in my living room or perhaps at my office, to remind me of the peace I found at that spot. And how important it is to take the shot.

But it’s not just about photography. Life is much the same. Opportunities are fleeting, like milkweed fluff on the wind, and are nothing to take for granted.

So…if you want something badly, take the shot.

If you love someone fiercely, take the shot.

If you believe in something deeply, take the shot.

And if there is an opportunity to do a kindness, take the shot.

Because too often we only get that one chance to take it…