| It was a good place for me to live out my high school years
I n June, Hillary flew to Little Rock for a visitI took her home the long way, to show her a part of the state I lovedWe drove west up the Arkansas River for seventy miles to Russellville, then south down Highway 7 through the Ouachita Mountains and National Forest, stopping from time to time to look at the beautiful vistasWe spent a couple of days in Hot Springs with Mother, Jeff, and Roger, then went back to Little Rock for a prep course on the Arkansas Bar exam, which proved helpful enough that both of us passed
After the bar, Hillary went back to Massachusetts to start her job with the Childrens Defense Fund, and I went to Fayetteville to begin my new life as a law professorI found the perfect place to live, a beautiful little house designed by the famous Arkansas architect Fay Jones, whose stunning Thorncrown Chapel in nearby Eureka Springs won international awards and accoladesThe house was on more than eighty acres of land about eight miles east of Fayetteville, on Highway 16The lands eastern border was the middle fork of the White RiverA few dozen cattle grazed the pastureThe house, built in the mid-1950s, was essentially a replica rolex submariner one-room structure, long and thin, divided down the middle, with the bathroom dropped like a block in the centerBoth the front and back walls were a series of sliding glass doors, which, along with skylights in the bedroom and bathroom, guaranteed lots of lightRunning in front of the whole length of the living room was a screened-in porch, which jutted out from the house as the land sloped down to the roadThe house proved to be a godsend of peace and quiet, especially after I started my first campaignI loved to sit on the porch and near the fireplace, and to walk in the field by the river with the cattle
The house did have a couple of drawbacksMice visited every nightWhen I realized I couldnt get rid of them and they kept to themselves in the kitchen, I started leaving them bread crumbsThe outdoors was full of spiders, ticks, and other menacesThey didnt bother me much, but when a brown recluse spider bit Hillary, her leg swelled up enormously and took a long time to go back downAnd the place was impossible to secureWe had a rash of burglaries across northwest Arkansas that summerThe culprit was hitting lots of rural houses up and down High-way 16One evening when I came home, it looked as if someone had been louis vuitton pochette there, but nothing was missingPerhaps Id scared him offOn impulse, I sat down and wrote a letter to the burglar, in case he came back:
Dear Burglar:
Things in my house were so much the same, I could not tell whether or not you actually entered the house yesterdayIf not, here is what you will finda TV which cost $80 new one and a half years ago; a radio which cost $40 new three years ago; a tiny record player that cost $40 new three years ago; and a lot of keepsakes, little things, very few of which cost over $10Almost all the clothes are over two or three years oldHardly worth risking jail forClinton
I taped the letter to the fireplaceUnfortunately, the ploy didnt workThe next day when I was at work, the guy came back and took the TV, the radio, the record player, and one thing I purposely left off the list: a beautifully engraved German military sword from World War II was heartsick about losing it because Daddy had given it to me, and because, just a year earlier, the only other valuable thing I owned, the Selmer Mark VI tenor saxophone Mother and Daddy had given me in 1963, had been stolen out of my car in WashingtonEventually I replaced the sax with a 1935 Selmer cigar cutter model, but the coco chanel leather handbags sword proved irreplaceable
I spent the last weeks of a very hot August preparing my classes and running around the university track in the hottest hours of the day, getting my weight down to 185 pounds for the first (and last) time since I was thirteenIn September, I began to teach my first classes: Antitrust, which I had studied at Yale and enjoyed very much, and Agency and Partnership, dealing with the nature of contractual relationships and the legal responsibilities that arise out of themI had sixteen students in Antitrust and fifty-six in A and PAntitrust law is rooted in the idea that the government should prevent the formation of monopolies as well as other noncompetitive practices in order to preserve a functioning, fair free-market economySince I knew that not all the students had a good grounding in economics, I tried hard to make the material clear and the principles understandableAgency and Partnership, by contrast, seemed straightforward enoughI was afraid the students would get bored and also miss the importance and occasional difficulty of determining the exact nature of the relationships between parties in a common enterprise, so I tried to think of interesting and illuminating rolex sea dweller examples to keep the classroom discussion goingFor example, the Watergate hearings and the White House response to the ongoing revelations had raised a lot of questions about the perpetrators of the break-inWere they agents of the President, and if not, for whom and on whose authority were they acting? In all the classes I taught, I tried to get a lot of students involved in the discussions and to make myself easily available to them in my office and around the law school
I enjoyed writing exams, which I hoped would be interesting, challenging, and fairIn the accounts Ive read of my teaching years, my grading has been questioned, with the implication that I was too easy, either because I was too soft or too eager not to offend potential supporters when I ran for officeAt Yale, the only grades were Honors, Pass, or FailIt was usually pretty hard to get Honors and virtually impossible to failAt many other law schools, especially those where the admissions standards were more lax, the grading tended to be tougher, with the expectation that 20 to 30 percent of a class should failI didnt agree with thatIf a student got a bad grade, I always felt like a failure too, for not having engaged his or her interest or chanel bag black and white ef |