The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

The moot court competition was much more fun to do because I was doing it with a friend. When we're not busy harassing each other about each other's baseball team of choice, we tend to get along pretty well. Still, I can't remember when the last time was when I traveled with someone. True, when I visited Ireland I met my friend there, but we'd come in on separate flights. As was the case in Bangkok, when we didn't even get there the same day... But traveling with someone from Point A to Point B, by plane, is sort of unfamiliar territory for me. Although it was convenient to have someone around who could keep an eye on the suitcases…

The school had booked us on Continental, which at first concerned me. After all, Continental has no reason to be nice to me. And I used to avoid it like the plague. But it was actually pretty nice. They let us fly out on an earlier flight without any problem - something that USAir and Alaska Air stupidly do not - so they get points in my book for that, at least. The flight down to Nashville had us changing planes in Newark, which still feels a little strange to me. I'm not used to Newark being a transit airport - I'm used to it being a destination. I'm also not used to being able to look out the window as we approach and recognize anything familiar (at least not of New Jersey, as I can usually figure out the New York skyline when I can see it…). But as we were nearing the airport I suddenly looked down and saw a landmark I recognized: the Sheraton Crossroads. "There's the Sheraton Crossroads!" I exclaimed. "I had a high school dance there! And Huey Lewis and the News played there once!" (At the Pathmark Tennis Open next door.)

Then once I had that landmark spotted, I could figure out some others. "There's Route 17! There's Ramsey! There's where the Bradlees was where I bought my first Huey Lewis record!" Next I spied the local train line, and with that I could identify a lot more. "There's Huffman's farm! There's the end of my street!" And then, accidentally quoting one of my favorite lines from the movie Hot Shots, I blurted out, "I can see my house from here!" Yep, there it was. Right next to "the intersection where I got hit by a car!"

OK, I guess that was kind of silly. But in all the years I've flown in and out of Newark, I'd never managed to see my house. Which always struck me as odd, because when I used to play in my backyard I'd constantly see planes fly over. We definitely seemed to be under one of the approaches to the airport, but I guess just the one for southerly-traveling planes. Since normally when I fly into Newark I'm flying in from either the west or the south, I guess that's why I never saw my house. Anyway, I found this all very exciting…

Eventually we got to Nashville, where it was dark (for the moment). We caught a cab to our hotel, which was just a quick walk down the street from the Vanderbilt law school. The next day was pretty much spent at the competition, but since we weren't in the finals on Friday afternoon we had some time to walk around during the afternoon. We ended up walking a loop from the hotel to the river, skirting through the edge of the Music Row neighborhood and then going through the historic downtown area. From there we walked north (and uphill) to the capitol building, and then worked our way back to the hotel.

There were some old things to see on the way. For instance, some buildings near the river seem original, as do some near the railroad tracks. However, Nashville has an awful lot of historic plaques around town saying something to the extent of, "Here stood a historic building of historic importance until 1979, when we knocked it down to build this office building."

On the whole, Nashville seemed like a very nice but poorly planned city. For instance, it was a terrible place for pedestrians. Sidewalks would suddenly end at high traffic intersections, with no signs, crosswalks, or traffic lights to help guide us safely across. We may have broken 12,000 local traffic laws trying to get where we were going, but at least we lived to tell about it…

We were scheduled to fly out early Saturday afternoon, and though we wanted to try to get out on an earlier flight, we decided to first take an hour in the morning to walk in the other direction about a mile to check out the Parthenon. Nashville has an art museum built in a building that's a replica of the Parthenon in Greece, right down to the Elgin Marbles decorating its eaves. We didn't have time to go inside, but we did ascertain that the outside did indeed look very Parthenon-like (at least to the extent we could determine it, since neither of us have seen the real thing).

Once back at the airport we tried to get out on an earlier flight routed through Newark, but alas, there was only one seat available on it, and I decided it would probably be best if I didn't ditch Mike in Tennessee. So we ended up on our regularly-scheduled flight to Cleveland. Once in Cleveland we heard them announce that they were overbooked on the flight to Boston and were looking for volunteers to get bumped, so we ended up trading in our seats for $500 vouchers on future flights. I'm very glad we did this, as I was wondering how I was going to pay for all the trips I want to take this year… (On the other hand, this means I'll be flying Continental again…)

Part of the arrangement required them sending us to Newark that evening, so it turns out we got to visit New Jersey again after all. They put us up in the airport Howard Johnson's and then we flew back to Boston the next morning. Unfortunately these arrangements meant that our time in Cleveland was extremely pointless. We didn't even have a chance to go see anything, not even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Instead we channeled the Sex Pistols and didn't go, meaning that over the course of the weekend we'd successfully managed to avoid no less than two music hall of fames, since we didn't go to the Country Music one in Nashville either. (Of course, for that one we weren't even slightly tempted.)

Still, even though we didn't see much in Nashville, it does seem like we got a feel for the place. It was kind of like what I observed in Germany when I went to the competition at WHU: you could either visit a place by looking at its museums, or you could visit a place by meeting its people. And that's what we did - meet the people who call Nashville home and see what their lives were like. Particularly the judges, all but one of whom were members of the local bar. As they spoke to us afterwards with their southern accents, recounting their southern experiences, I felt like we were visiting their world. A world apart from our Yankee one, and yet exactly the same. For all our regional cultural differences, we were still united by a common law.