Satan is in the Details

I mailed in my Juror Questionnaire with six days to spare! Nobody's going to issue a warrant for Val Thevictorian's arrest!

They're pretty nosy over there at that circuit clerk's office. Has Val or anyone in her immediate family ever been a party to a lawsuit? Had a claim for personal injuries made against them? OF COURSE! Hasn't everybody? Okay. Maybe not everybody. Maybe not anybody reading about Val's sordid life. But let the record show that Val had to answer these questions TRUTHFULLY to the best of her knowledge. And her sweet baboo has been party to a lawsuit. One that involved personal injury.

Hick has not led the charmed rainbows-and-unicorn life of Val Thevictorian. Unlike Val, Hick was not born with a stainless-steel spoon in his mouth. Not even like Genius was he born with a blue plastic color-changing Sonic spoon in his mouth. Nope. Hick was born with one of those splintery, wooden, flat-like-a-paint-stirrer, 1960s-elementary-school-lunchroom, cardboard-cup-of-vanilla-ice-cream spoons in his mouth. He had to work for everything he got. Even the cardboard to stuff in his shoes to cover the hole in the sole that he hoped nobody would see when he walked up the school steps. Forget about pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. Hick didn't even have boots.

He started working at age 13, in a service station within walking distance of his house, for not a salary, but all the soda and candy he could ingest. After a while he earned money, worked his way up to a bigger service station once he bought a car, and eventually landed a job working for the city where my sister's husband the ex-mayor later became mayor. As a city employee, he had various duties. From cleaning out sewer traps to taking care of the dogs at the pound to setting off fireworks at the July 4 celebration to driving a city truck.

Therein lies the root of Hick's lawsuit.

"Hey, I have to finish this jury paper and send it in so they don't arrest me. Have you ever been party to a lawsuit, or a personal injury claim?"

"Well, yeah. The time I ran over that old lady, she sued the city, and when she didn't get enough money, she sued me."

"You DID run over her. What were you driving?"

"A 1954 Chevy panel truck."

"Not that specific! I mean, was it for the fire department, the trash pickup..."

"It was the city truck."

"How bad did you hurt her?"

"Oh, she just broke her wrist."

"That's all?"

"Well, she skinned her knees."

"You didn't drag her under the truck, did you?"

"No. Well. She WAS under the truck. Under the tire."

"WHAT?"

"When I turned into her, she fell down."

"So you had to go to court?"

"Yeah. It was 35 years ago. But it was in the circuit court. I'm sure they have a record of it."

I doubt that's enough to get me out of jury duty. Probably just enough to get me out of the interesting cases, like that one several years ago when a guy who crashed his motorcycle and broke a leg sued Backroads for not sweeping loose gravel off the streets. Back then, I told my mom, my school-dropper-offer for Genius and Little Pony, that I had to sit in on the preliminaries, but that my number was not called to be interviewed as a possible juror.

"Oh, that's Satan!" said Mom.

Uh huh. Broken-Leg Guy's nickname was Satan. Which is better than Broken-Leg Guy, I guess, if you're a motorcycle-rider.

What possessed him to sue a city for daring to have gravel on the road is beyond me. My whole road is gravel.