The Gentleman Who Was Thursday

Extract

When Marie Failinger and I began to play with metaphors as we talked about the scroll to honor Tom Shaffer, well, we did consider and discard some. From that heap of castoffs, I want to begin big and tell you the clearest discard, the biggest miss: Tom as a peach of a man. The positive side of the image is roundness as an indicator of wholeness, of even feminine circularity, of integrity. The down side of roundness need not be spelled out in detail (and we certainly do not want to suggest fuzziness)… but there is that one lingering wild hare, the peach's suggestion of the Southern gentleman, that Atticus Finch or Walker Percy who never quite migrates into the contemporary scene. That Southern gentry anomaly is central to Tom, and the struggle with how he can almost redeem the notion of lawyer as gentleman is for me the story of Tom as round in the finest sense, like a magic circle cast by the best of the Spirit, gentle, true, deceptively radical, quietly if slowly revolutionary, and only just a little repetitious. (Consider the list of 274 of his publications we got in the conference materials—274! I certainly have not read all 274, but even within the ones I have, there is stuff I've seen more than once). Even that repetition becomes the mark of fidelity, however. For Tom is unwilling to leave even the anachronism, the gentleman lawyer, out of the circle into which he has invited a persistently motley crew of clients and friends and students and invisible rabbits (ask him about Elwood Dowd sometime).