It was Monday morning. I was headed across the park in the interests of appearing at the short calendar. As usual, I was pathologically early. It was cold.

Until this point, the effects of the failing economy on the law business generally had not been manifest to me, unless you count the fact that we don’t buy those really nice, very expensive gel pens that I like so much anymore. The only other readily apparent sign of the deepening recession was that the management of my building appeared to be so profoundly affected by the fiscal crisis that it had left the air conditioning on. I suspect that it was in denial and pretending that it was still August, before the first of the recent skids suffered by the stock exchange, and was trying to persuade itself that it was not really the end of October.