This is really good - in some ways, I think it's one of your best. Thank you for sharing this piece of yourself, Dick. It's golden.

I love this.

Beautiful, Mr. Day.

I agree with the other assessments.  It took my breath away.   Thanks for opening up that small window into your life.   Reading it brought me great joy and sadness.
 

At the risk of sounding like the setup for a standard lawyer joke, there are lawyer ethics and then there are human ethics. You might have been violating lawyer ethics, but you were upholding human ethics. Of that, I have no doubt.

You have pretty damn good good judgment on right and wrong. Better than most.

And if that DUI guy had next run over people instead of lamp posts, I am sure you would have heard of it, so between that and his other offense, they probably did OK after you took care of them, which is why they never came back.

Sometimes you can change people's lives for the better, and it lasts, even though many times you never find out about it. Think of the people you know who changed your life, people whom you never were able to thank for their efforts, or their ethics.

That is the trouble with getting old, our regrets have a way of creeping up on us.  They just sneak in all kinds of ways.  Mrs. Johnson probably stayed away because of shame.  You know shame and embarrassment is a very strong feeling and we naturally avoid facing it. She put it all behind her and moved on. 

You did good by them when they needed you and that is all that mattered.

Enjoyed a peek into your life.   

Great post.

One thing that improves the human species is by ndividuals asking could I have done better by that person, or could I have done more? The hope is to do better the next time and the time after that. Whenever we think that we have been perfect, we are lost.

Thanks again for sharing.

A Day on Mars?

You had me at “I AM VOLUNTARILY PREPARING TO DIE ON MARS.”

We have known each other for a long time.  The thought of sending you on a one way trip to Mars immediately re-kindled my flagging hope for the future.  As I have become a curmudgeonly old man the small fire that is my optimism often needs to be re-ignited and such thoughts as this stir once again a flickering flame from my ashes.

We live in amazing times where things that were once the stuff of fantasy and dreams are now possible due to advances in science and technology.  The ancients had their Icarus.  Are you our modern son of Day (Daedelus in the ancient spelling)?

Then again the myth of Icarus is a cautionary tale about hubris.  Icarus flew too close to the sun.  His technology failed him and he fell into the sea.  One must in the end live within the boundaries of Nature, a lesson especially needed in these times.  

There is a more modern tale that speaks another admonition.  Consider this.  We are both older gentlemen and it is in the Nature of things that we discard more and more bits of ourselves about the environment.  Our eyes randomly drip more moisture than when we were young.  We cough and sneeze with unpleasant regularity.  Our dryer skin flakes and flutters to the ground.  Now the human body is home to myriad forms of flora and fauna.  (Have you seen the images of mites (Demotex) the live in our eye lashes?).  We are as well home to many non-living particles such as viruses.  So imagine yourself wandering the surface of Mars, dropping living and half-living detritus onto the unforgiving terrain - unforgiving except for the fact that none of the inhabitants of those bits will face any natural enemies.  This was the warning inside the plot for the novel and movie Jurrasic Park – the pertinent line of dialogue – “Life finds a way.” Rather than being a single visitor to the red planet, you may create an entire menagerie of critters – invasive flora and fauna of many types.  One might even speculate that our planet which was once as inhospitable a place as current day Mars may have experienced a visit of a single blogger from some distant planet, an older gentleman, and thus Earth came alive.

Lastly probably all of us these days are given to dreams of escaping the current condition of life.  We dream of a world more consonant with our personal sensibilities and, yes, ethics.  But again caution is warranted.  The poet Milton wrote about this in his “Paradise Lost”. When asked why he rebelled against God himself,  Lucifer is made to respond “It is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” As I said it is a miracle of technology that you might travel to Mars.  But it is a more impressive miracle of Nature that a man of your good character exists at all, especially in these times.  I have a different dream for you.  I dream of the candidacy of Elizabeth Warren and Richard Day for President and Vice-President of the United States.

(As for the body of your post entitled “Ethics”, you long ago revealed in your writings a most humane and empathetic being.  I am not the least surprised to find wisdom in your latest piece.)

Wow D... but what came to me at the end was you don't have to Mars for not being perfect....  not that you were saying that.  Guess I am thinking from the perspective of a kid whose dad is fighting cancer and a ton of other things.  He is a sci fi freak though so I suppose if that was they way he wanted to go, I would have to support it:)