Last week, I got a call from Cleat, a friend and mentor who I worked with in my first job as an associate in Orlando in 1994. Hopefully he'll be one of my regular blog visitors.Cleat and I got off to a bit of a rocky start. I was a new attorney when I was assigned to the team that he was in charge of. I know he relished the role of waiting for me to make certain mistakes so he could swoop in with his wisdom. "Rookie errors" he called them. Like the time I had the audacity to use the words "and/or" in something I wrote for him. He took what I had written, and put it back on my desk with a Florida court case haphazardly stapled on top of it. The case had quotes characterizing the use of "and/or" as poor legal drafting.
Despite his sometimes strange teaching tactics, I liked Cleat and grew to admire him as a fun, loving and good man. Oh--and I can't forget interesting, too. Cleat checks in on me a few times a year and we always have good talks. He’s an open person and really likes communicating. And he’s a good listener. He has often been encouraging to me and I KNEW he really liked me when I closed the door to his office in Orlando, sat down and told him I was leaving for a job in Boston. His response was that he knew that my leaving was a possibility but he kept hoping it wouldn’t happen. He said he had hoped I would fall in love with someone while in Florida—like his oldest son who worked with us at the firm—and stay in Orlando permanently. How much does a mentor have to like you to wish, even fleetingly, that you were his daughter-in-law?
Last week when we spoke, Cleat told me that his youngest son (now 24 years old) had been in a serious car accident on December 1. At the time of the accident, his son needed several surgeries and it was uncertain if he would be able to walk again. Thus far, his progress has been remarkable and he is walking quite well. From the day after the accident, Cleat wrote daily reports on his son’s progress and e-mailed them to family and friends. He sent the whole month’s worth of e-mails to me last week. Reading them was compelling. In the midst of the challenges and difficulties with his son’s situation, Cleat pointed out all of the good--from each dedicated worker at the hospital they encountered to the fact that he was fortunate to spend lots of quality time at the hospital alone with his son.
Part of life is the constant possibility that something unexpected and seemingly bad can happen. But those challenges are often what bring us closer to others and prompt us to rise to the occasion and grow. Thanks for the inspirational perspective, Cleat.
