A Walk In The Park
I put down my pencil and closed my sketch book and flipped to a clean page in my yellow legal pad. I almost missed my cue, so fascinated was I with the Court Reporter’s elegant fingers tapping her machine as though it was a miniature piano and she was performing the Goldberg Variations. The artistic problem was to express that motion in two dimensions, but a problem for later. For now the Assistant District Attorney was about to reach the main theme of his summation that of the dishonesty of the defendant. The lines were drawn for a contest of credibility, trial by combat, crossed swords, a duel behind the cathedral at dawn. This would be the hill where one of us would survive to fight another day and the other perish. Figuratively speaking, of course. I braced myself and then winced as the ADA pushed ahead with his remarks. A man of average height, I imagined him as a diminutive aboriginal hunter of the rain forest and the defendant, his prey, a colored bird with his breast pl