After only one day of jury selection, I was still content to joke about things and jot down a few acerbic observations that crossed my otherwise-blank mind:

Telling me to be back in the room at 10:00 AM and then not doing anything until 10:40 AM is not the way to win favor with a Virgo who is always five minutes early.

This endless hurry-and-wait atmosphere drives me crazy in regular life, and more-so when sitting to be called for the jury.

If this is what you wear to Jury Duty, in an official court house, what in the fuck do you wear in the comfort of your own home? No, I don’t want to know.

If this is what you smell like at Jury Duty… you must be one of those hoarders.

My excuses are all in order – if asked, I’m going to sing like a canary: my marriage to a retired cop, a list of the family arrests, and the complete and total inability to recognize right from wrong and a strong tendency to err on the side of the latter more often than not. Oh, and my utter distaste and distrust for the po-po – someone said I should incorporate the po-po into this for good measure.

One final observation: as tedious as the process is, everyone who works here, from the guards to the stewards to the lawyers, seems to be in good spirits and happy to be doing their job. I am not accustomed to this.

Being called to Jury Duty is one of those things that most people complain about, and not without reason. It’s a disruption, it’s a time commitment, but I understand it’s a civic duty that aids in affording us the due process that this country provides. (That said, I’d still rather not do it – I have no business judging anything beyond fashion and gay pride parade floats – and even then it’s sketchy.)

Yet even at the start I was coming around to seeing this as an experience I needed, and that began with me giving my reverence to the task at hand. First, I had to respect the process. I’ll admit, I didn’t have much patience for it when I got my summons in the mail. I was aware of the glacial pace of most legal proceedings, and that even with the preliminary step of jury selection there was an awful lot of down-time and sitting-still. Usually, I don’t have a problem with that – tell me I have a ten-hour layover and I’ll happily hunker down in the airport lounge with a book and some magazines. But there’s something different about doing that as part of a jury. There’s no happy destination at the end of it all.

I was also envisioning the most exciting scenario as a case of petty larceny or vandalism or other mundane legal mumbo jumbo which would have me asleep from boredom or disinterest.

I was wrong. Well, I was mostly wrong. Much of the jury selection process is tedious and boring and incredibly repetitive (particularly if you’re selected in the first round and have to endure two more rounds of the same questions…) And there are definitely periods of interminable waiting, where you’re called back into the court room only to be told you are taking a lunch break (like you really couldn’t lump the break five minutes prior into that?)

But it instilled some invaluable lessons. Andy said I would learn a lot – and I did. Not just about the court system, and the way trials are heard and debated, but about human nature, about justice, about the way we treat each other.

After my first day, before I even got to see the defendant (I was in the back row and hadn’t yet been selected) my first lesson was to obey the law; I did not want to end up in anything remotely close to the position the defendant was in. I looked out the window at the spire of St. Mary’s and the pair of pigeons flying overhead, and I wondered if he was already longing for freedom, for the simple sensation of being outside on his own. It was something we all took for granted, and suddenly the tone of this trial, and my jury duty, took its first irrevocably serious turn. But I did not know that then. I was still able to joke about it, still capable of a laugh at the whole situation, still holding onto the silly things that, up to and including that moment, constituted my life.

Here’s a little known fact about me: if you tell me something, I’ll probably broadcast it to the world (especially if it involves a childhood experiment of sticking a banana up your ass). However, if you tell me something in confidence, and explicitly state that I am not to repeat it, I can be as closed-mouth as a clam. I’ve done this with certain pregnancies (not mine) and surprise parties. That said, when I found out I had jury duty a few weeks ago, I was, initially, broadcasting it to the world.

I put up sarcastic FaceBook posts, funny Tweets, and blog posts decrying the whole idea of me serving on a jury. I threatened to wear a hat and veil and quote ‘Sunset Boulevard’ if I came close to being selected. I even put up the court room scene of Lady Chablis from ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil’ as inspiration should the lawyers even consider fucking with me on a jury. And then I was selected. For a murder trial, and an apparently well-known murder trial at that – one which I, in my news/newspaper avoiding life of ignorant bliss, had never heard about.

Once the jury was selected, the judge was adamant with his admonitions, and I was not to speak to anyone about the trial. I listened and followed his advice. Though it took all my self-control not to run home and Google the involved parties, I refrained. (If it ever came down to getting me Al Capone tax-evasion-style for something like that, my computer search record would not show anything to incriminate me.) I also held my tongue, and removed the generic jury duty comments from my blog and FaceBook and Twitter. If someone made a jury reference, I deleted it instantly. This was something I took seriously, and if you are ever in that position and hear how the judge explains the importance of honoring the process, you would do the same.

Luckily there is an end to every trial, and a time when one is finally free to speak openly about everything that went on. Hell, it’s a matter of public record. And now, as the walrus said, the time has come to talk of many things. This is my jury diary. It starts off as ridiculously as you might expect my jury story to begin, but it ends up becoming something I never thought it would be.

Out of respect to my fellow jurors, a group of people I came to genuinely like through the arduous journey we were on together, I am omitting a lot (and there will not be anything personal written about our deliberation and what exactly went on in those long hours), but the feel for how things affected me remains. I am choosing to write about it now because I have to let some of it out. It is already threatening to consume me – and whenever that happens I find writing and sharing a necessary outlet. It is the only way I have ever known.

At the very end of our service, the judge said we were no longer bound to remain silent, but that everything that went on in the jury room could be a book we chose to close and keep secret. I’m not ready to let anyone read that entire book, but I’ll let you see a few pages…

These are immense birds, and even at a distance their size can be seen, almost felt, in the way they thunder through the trees and the manner the boughs sway and creak beneath their weight. Even in their quiet stealth, they can be seen out of the corner of the eye – so as I was coming out of the pool the other day, my gaze was taken by the large bit of movement barreling down through the large oak tree in our side yard. At first I thought one of them had attacked the other, and that the injured hawk had fallen down, plummeting through leaf-filtered sunlight, catching itself just before it hit the ground. I grabbed my camera and went to explore where it looked like the bird had come to a stop.

Its eyes and head were staring straight ahead, focused and sure, and it didn’t look hurt. It stayed there, hanging for a bit allowing me to get a few photos, studying me for a moment as intently as I was studying it. Time stilled, and the majesty of this magnificent creature rendered me silent. It looked around, and in the brief seconds our eyes met I wanted to cry.

I haven’t spoken in detail about my experience with jury duty because it was one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do in my life. Only now am I just beginning to attempt to process the extent of all that transpired. To that end, I’ve kept largely quiet as to what really went on, and how things played out. For me, it’s still raw, I’m still healing – and I don’t like to share things until I’ve figured out what it all means. But that day may never come, and holding things in has never worked well for me. Neither has burying feelings and emotions.

During the trial, I kept a journal of sorts, and after re-reading it I’ve decided to share a little of it on here (well, perhaps a lot). A word of warning: for the next week there will be nothing but jury diary posts in this space, with no gratuitous male nudity, no Madonna nip-slips, and not much fun after the first few entries of jury selection wardrobe nightmares. There will be no photos, no visual stimulation, just a vast bunch of prose capturing what I was feeling and going through at the time of the trial.

If you’re bored by legal talk, or by a case that has been tried and put to rest, circle back sometime next week when we’ll return to the mindless frivolity that occupies most of this site. If, however, you want to read something a little different from my usual posts, perhaps something a little deeper, settle in for a few wordy posts of my jury duty experience.

My latest adventures in babysitting resulted in the first time I gave my nephew Noah a brief time-out. Now, I really don’t know how to do a time-out. I’ve heard the term thrown around and never paid it much mind. I figured it was this magical zone that only adults who didn’t have a firm hand resorted to when things got a little rough. I should have paid more attention.

Let me go back to how it came about. I can take a lot from my niece and nephew, and I’m not any sort of disciplinarian. I’m their fun ‘Unca Al’, who lets them horse around and scream and dance and do all the things that kids want to do. But there are limits, and one of them is when Noah starts throwing things. I can take a ball or two, or a plush backpack, maybe even a small plastic animal, but when a big-ass heavy toy truck gets thrown at me, that’s the limit. And even then, I let it slide twice, but on the third go, it was time for the time-out.

I looked toward the corner where I thought my Mom said they went for this scenario. ‘Shouldn’t there be some sort of holding pen, or box, or padded cell?’ I wondered. I saw nothing. What was going to contain him? Maybe this was a new sort of open-air time-out for a two-year-old, maybe they had graduated to a corner of the couch. It was the only area I could see. I picked him up and placed him on the couch telling him he had a time-out and had to sit there.

The waterworks started immediately. I thought this time-out thing was supposed to stop the crying? What was I doing wrong? I picked up his sister and we walked to the other end of the room. Noah got up and followed us, crying at the top of his lungs. I put Emi down and brought Noah back to the couch, saying he had one minute left in his time-out. He stayed put for a second or two (literally) and popped right back up, still crying. This was not going well. The time-out was a bust. I tried one last time, putting him back on the couch telling him he had to stop crying if he wanted to end the time-out, all the while wondering how many words he actually understood. “If you don’t stop crying, you can’t finish your time out,” I pleaded, and the weakness in my voice was almost laughable. I was sure Emi was smirking the whole time. Finally, Noah walked up to me and I couldn’t do it any more. I picked him up, held him close and told him it was all right. We sat down on the couch and I rubbed his back until his tears stopped.

“Are you going to say you’re sorry?” I asked quietly.

His eyes looked down, and the faintest little ‘Sorry’ escaped his lips. I hugged him closer, rubbing his back, and told him it was okay.

He said it better than I ever could.

A minute later he was rolling on the floor, laughing as I tickled him and his sister. Maybe the time out worked in some small way after all. I wonder if it would work on Andy?