Sleepiness should be rejected. It leads to sleep.

There was a prayer I said with my mother:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I learned it so young, the memory is part phonetic. "Lay me" was "layme", a comfortable-sounding word. I came to understand the prayer’s meaning after I learned to say the words. I realized that at least half of it dealt with what would happen if I died. How unthinkable, to a child. I was immortal, and stayed so for many years.

What was my mother thinking? Teaching her son a prayer that addressed death in his sleep? I have remembered the prayer, but it has always seemed impossible with my own children. That may be because I am one more generation away from the time when children died all the time. They were fragile, they died. There must have been so much pain. Did working the possibility into a nightly prayer help to cope?

Sad to say that bedside prayers with Dad never really caught on in this family, with this prayer or any others. But Mom’s layme prayer has come back to me. It fits a death-confronting adult pretty well - maybe it was never a child’s prayer at all.

The calculus makes me dizzy. The planet
swims with warrior fish, they understand
their schooling. I who swim alone do not.
Do you ask whether I will do battle?

No, not whether you will go into battle.
I assume you are an honorable man.
My question: would you send your son into battle.

Every day a lawyer tells his client about the vagaries of litigation. Going to trial in America means uncertainty, cost, and often an unfair outcome. (Outside America, even more unfair.) When you’re a defendant you can’t escape it. But when you bring the case – when you’re a plaintiff – you have to take this into account. There is never a sure thing, never.

Litigation is thus a little like war. Uncertain, costly, often with an unfair result. When you are attacked you have to deal with it. When you attack you take your chances.

The dangerous point: the distinctions between defendant and plaintiff, attacked and attacker. Attackers say they were attacked, although in a way that may not have been war. Plaintiffs say they were damaged, but not in litigation. It spirals backward. Who committed the first offense? As we said on the playground, who started it?

And -- in trials we almost always just deal with money. In war we deal, always, with death. The calculus is similar. The stakes are not.

Beyond the discipline there is a kind
of peace. Beyond the order there is peace
as well, a curiosity of mind.
Beyond the bluff is just bare honesty.

This trick is won but yet this game is still
begun and losses are ahead. If honor lies
and lies are honored, games of chance we will
commence before imagination dies.

There. I’ve won. Your money comes to me
I scoop it forward, dragging it across
the table felt, for riches I can see
if only for an instant, not a loss.

This way we conquer bits of life in hands
of playing cards that no one understands.