Jury Duty (Day 1 of.....1!)

The murals at 60 Centre St., the location of New York's Supreme Court, were intriguing, and once in the juror's waiting room, beautiful.  In the main lobby were the standards of Authority, Justice, Clemency, and Security, depicted by half-clad women; but once in the upstairs holding space, the murals were places in Manhattan:  Riverside Church with a freshly landscaped green knoll in the 1930s, the Woolworth building, the view of the harbor and the Statute of Liberty.  That may have been where the beauty of the day ended, though.

Jury duty was a suspenseful experience to go through, but in the end, I got a taste of the legal system, and don't have to do it again for another 6 years.  And that's fine by me.  I did get called, and had to go into a room with about 30 other people.  We sat there and listened to a story told by one of the lawyers about the two people that were sitting on either side of them, that had broken off a relationship in what seemed an unfortunately ugly manner quite a few years ago that had actually made it to press (I hadn't heard of it, but then I didn't really catch their names, nor did I follow New York local news while I lived in Japan).  I had gone into jury duty not wanting to serve, simply because for me as a self-employed person, it means a huge loss of income (others get paid their normal salary by their employers).  But being in the room with these lawyers and these people opened my eyes in a way that I did not want to see anymore.  People go through some difficult things.  It gets ugly.  I didn't see how I could emotionally handle a trial like this.

Luckily, after questioning all the people in the room to a sometimes intimate degree (are you currently single?  did your father's lawsuits effect you emotionally?  how do you feel about a certain institution?) they determined that basically all of us were jury-able, and so took the first six people (not me!).  I went back to the waiting room and sat for another hour, working on my website before the head clerk announced that there would be no more cases for the rest of the day, or tomorrow, so we were all excused to go.  Such a sigh of relief!

I feel very fortunate to have an extremely simple and idyllic life of music and children (young and old).  Sometimes my wish for my students is for them to stay as young as possible for as long as possible (maybe save toilet-training, etc).  And sometimes I feel that music does this for people, that I am much younger than many of the cross-section of professional New Yorkers that surrounded me in that room, a large percentage of which worked in some sort of financial sector.  Life can be so serious, and sometimes even so dark, but in music, it seems there is always a way to check in with other emotions, to find an inner space of play and beauty, even if it means to interact with those dark emotions in a non-hurtful way.  It gives an outlet for them.  Seeing a small window into the pain that can be thrown back and forth between people (without knowing any of the details) was incredibly exhausting for my child-like brain.  And so luckily tomorrow, I have a jury-free day.