If you had to identify some of life’s greatest gifts, other than your faith, what would they be? Two different stories, with two different people, and two very different circumstances, give us a big clue. One of the organizations in our area which deals with the aging population does so with kindness and special insight. It deals with seniors suffering through the ravages of dementia in all of its forms. But it sees past the loss of a mind that once was to what remains in the core of us all. It’s a sort of double vision which sees the character of every life.

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His career started out poorly, to put it mildly. He studied law in upstate New York, at a law school no one I know ever heard of. He worked a few years at a small law firm in Albany, N.Y., and when that did not go particularly well, he moved to a small town in Wisconsin to practice. He practiced there for two years when his office building, containing his entire practice, burned down. He moved to California to work in a retail store with some of his brothers, but returned to Albany when that did not work out. He went back to California a couple of years after that.

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If you asked many people who know a lawyer how they would describe the personality type of that lawyer, it would not take them very long until the got to the "A" word. Lawyers are known far and wide as "A" type personalities. That's generally not a bad thing, of course. No one gets much of any place worth going without some focus and intensity.

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He was just another young lawyer in a small firm in a small, tough, mountain town. At least, that's the way it started. In time, however, he became a lawyer of great distinction nationally. Over the broad reach of his distinguished career, he was revered by even his most ardent opponents as a lawyer's lawyer.

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One of the most valuable lessons I learned about being a lawyer I learned before I started law school. I worked as a runner for a law firm in college. The firm was a prominent, old-line firm with a good book of business, and it had some high-powered lawyers to take care of that business. One of the lawyers was particularly bright, and well regarded for his intellect. He had graduated No. 1 in his class at a top 10 law school. And he had the ego to go along with it.

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"What part of ‘no' don't you understand?" sings the country song that was popular a number of years ago. The difficulty with the "no" word is not the understanding of it. The difficulty is in the saying of it. This is a lesson I learned the hard way a couple of years after I had started my own law practice.

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One-hundred-fifty years ago, on May 18, 1860, history itself took a sweet and stunning swing to the good. On that day, on the third ballot at the National Convention of America's new Republican Party, overcoming all odds [...]

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