When I hung up my rhetorical gloves and took down my shingle, I thought I was done was the law business. I was wrong.
During my legal career, I was a joiner. I served on the boards of all sorts of organizations -- charitable, political, legal, non-profit, religious. Being a part of my community was simply who I was.
But I decided the day I retired was the end of those days. No more organizations. No more boards. No more legal advice tarting up well-reasoned musings. I was going to live my life in Mexico free of the ties that bind.
So I thought. I have now lived here six years and I am once again knee deep in organization stuff.
At least, I have managed to put a corral around most of my activities. My support for the migrant worker Indian school is low key -- and one of my favorite interests.
The most formal is my service on our church board. When asked to serve, I was reluctant to sign on. I could not think of any unique talent or perspective that I could bring to the board.
Then a project came along that lit up my switchboard. We are putting together documents to allow us to operate as a religious association in Mexico. The process sounds very straight forward. But, like most straight-forward projects that require documents in my new country, challenges have arisen.
The first step is a very familiar one to me -- revising bylaws. I have probably written and amended a hundred or so sets of bylaws during my legal career.
I started slowly. I have been fiddling with a draft over the past few months while most of our congregants were still up north. Now that all of the board members are here or on their way, it was time to put a proposal on the table.
Yesterday, my friend Lou and I walked through my draft and made some substantive and minor changes to our existing set of bylaws. I spent Monday evening getting it into final form. Adding Oxford commas. Dropping extraneous capitalization. And interlacing the proposed revisions.
I have to confess that I loved doing it. After all, this is the type of work I did for thirty years. But not one of my previous bylaw projects included tinkering wit words while sitting on a restaurant balcony framed by palm trees with an oceanic infinity pool dropping off over the horizon.
I still wonder how I managed to get myself back in the role of The Organizational Man. But, for one day, at least, I am reveling in my reversion.
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