Reflection 1

“Over the course of 1975 and much of 1976, the period of my adulthood when I was most afflicted by childish nightmares . . . “

Like the narrator, I, too, had the worst nightmares of my adulthood in the mid-1970s. But, unlike him, I didn’t dismiss them as befitting a child. They terrified me. Once I woke up believing that something (I no longer remember what) was going to slip out of the crack in the floor under the radiator and murder me in my bed.

During this troubled time, what provided me with some solace was watching the TV show Kate McShane starring the daffy Anne Meara as a lawyer (it was the first series to feature a female lawyer in the lead role) who turned for help to her father, an ex-cop, and her brother, a priest and law professor (a family stamped perhaps to the point of parody with its Irish working-class background). What I recall about the show was that McShane didn’t prove the innocence of her clients but led them to making heartbreakingly justifiable or penitent confessions for having committed the crimes. I, who would plead guilty to any crime you dragged me down to the police station to accuse me of, may be totally misremembering this.