SO, HOW DO YOU LIKE BEING RETIRED?

That's a question everybody asks a newly "retired" person. I get it a lot. I ask it myself when I meet someone who has just left his usual job description and not taken up something else yet. The answers are always interesting because every person is different.

No one has yet told me, "Oh, you know, I hate being retired. I don't know what to do with myself." But those people must exist. They must be around, because I do meet a lot of people who are "thinking of" retiring.

But those persons thinking of retiring tell me, "I don't think I will do it. I don't know what I would do with myself." Some of them surely must retire and then be unhappy. There must be a lot of former judges with post-retirement malaise, because the Tennessee Judicial Conference has periodic programs on postpartum depression.

When I get the question posed to me, I want to redefine it. I want the question to be, "How do you like not doing what you did for thirty-two years?" That's easy to answer: I love not doing what I did for thirty-two years. But in no sense do I consider myself "retired." I am just working in new areas. One of them is writing.

There are things I miss and don't miss about the judgeship of thirty-two years:

• I do not miss handling the busiest trial court of record in Tennessee. In the twelve months of 2013, my last full calendar year, I concluded 4,843 cases. (A "court of record" is one in which there is a record of the proceedings. In courts "not of record," oral proceedings are not recorded, and the judge makes his or her decision based on notes and memory. Circuit judge Rosenbalm's decision which you can read at the end of this book in ENDNOTE 2, was taken by a court reporter, and "put of record" — entered upon the minutes of the court — by the court clerk.)

• I do not miss talking to the jail at midnight to set bond and to schedule arraignments.

• I do not miss the lame excuses litigants give for man's inhumanity to man.

• I do not miss the sixty to seventy-hour work weeks — at court, in chambers, and at home — those hours absolutely necessary to handle incoming work. And I am sure my wonderful wife Diana does not miss those work weeks.

• I miss my great law clerks, who were then third-year law students from UT College of Law and Lincoln Memorial Law School — Elisabeth Bellinger, Jimmy Carter, Sharon Eun, John Higgins, Ryann Musick Jeffers, Holly Martin, Tina Osborn, Patrick Rose, Luke Shipley, Stephanie Epperson Stuart, Megan Swain.

• I miss the annual trial dockets Fourth Circuit held on the road at those two law schools, year after year, giving the entire student body — 1Ls, 2Ls, and 3Ls — real courtrooms, three of them, all day long. Complete with prisoners and weeping litigants.

• I miss my wonderful court clerks, the Knox County employees who worked so hard to help domestic violence victims.

• I miss the best secretary in the world, Rachel. (An aside here: When I ever-so-slowly eased out her excellent predecessor, who had become with time not so excellent, Rachel's predecessor told me I would "rue the day" if I should replace her. I did not.)

• I miss seeing my attorney friends five days a week.

• I miss my many Special Masters, who served without pay every Thursday on domestic violence day, so that with three courts we could handle the docket load.

• I miss the domestic violence docket itself — that is, I miss the good work that the Special Masters, that Pat Bright, a gifted professional, and I did week after week. We complemented and amplified the excellent work of Legal Aid of East Tennessee, of the University of Tennessee nursing program, and of a host of fifty other professionals who saw a problem and rose to meet it.

• I miss being in a judgeship which has the power to help people (1) directly, (2) on schedule, (3) when they ask for it. Of course, even now I can and do help people through pro bono work and otherwise.

• And happily I anticipate opening a mediation practice in family law soon, where again I will be able to help people (1) directly, (2) on schedule, (3) when they ask for it.

WHO ARE THE BEST PEOPLE? LAWYERS ARE THE BEST PEOPLE

Mary Kathleen Cunningham and I married in 1966. In 1972 Mary and I left Providence, Rhode Island, to enter law school in my home town, at the University of Tennessee George C. Taylor College of Law. We had a two-year-old boy in arms.

Mary worked very hard and made law review. I worked very hard and made pater cum laude. Mary eventually died of MS; my second marriage (but for two fine children and some great in-laws) was a mistake; and my third marriage has been twenty years of bliss and counting.

There is perhaps a fourth marriage, or maybe even more, which I will explain in a moment.

It was immediately clear to me the first day of law school that my fellow students were the best people in the world. Never in the previous thirteen years of academia had I encountered such joy of life, such spontaneous friendship. It continued through law school and into eight years' practice of law, and then through thirty-two years on the bench.

Lawyers are the best people in the world. And flexible: back then in law school, when we didn't have law licenses to lose, we often went to cock fights in South Knox County.

There we mixed with children and old men, talked with ladies from the auxiliary selling hotdogs and grilled cheese sandwiches for the church. And with young wives and sons-in-law, who were putting "two on the gray," or "five on the little red."

They were there for diversion, the society of friends, an evening off. They would break even, or win fifteen or lose fifteen. I like to think they were also there because they just would not be politically correct, would not buy the cultural imperialism of the sensitive elite. Would not tolerate being labeled rednecks, fools, misdemeanants, or as the newspaper liked to call them, consorters with drug dealers and mafiosi. "For the Lord's sake," I can imagine these good people saying, "It's the pennyrile pit in Lester's barn. Don't get your pants in a wad."

There are joys inherent in a judgeship, sure. Two stand out. The first is the ability always to do the right thing, the best thing, for the given facts of a case. The second is the continued association with the best and the brightest lawyers in East Tennessee from 1982 through 2014, the thirtytwo years of being a circuit court judge.

I taught many years at the National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada; many years statewide for the Tennessee Judicial Conference; and many years for the Tennessee Bar Association and the Knoxville Bar Association. Teaching lawyers is far better than teaching judges. Practicing lawyers still have the joy of life, while we judges tend to be a bit verklemmt — I guess "wedged" is the best English for the German word describing a constrained attitude toward life.

Of course, having your home shot up, being stalked, and being threatened in social media and otherwise are pretty good reasons to end up wedged. That's why you won't find my children or grandchildren in my writings by name or town.

And then there's the running for public office. I like to say I have three doctorates — a Yale Ph.D. (German Literature), my beloved J.D. from the University of Tennessee George C. Taylor School of Law, and a third doctorate in Elected Office Politics (EOP).

After four campaigns for those eight-year terms, my EOP degree comprises more hours of intense learning than formal training ever did. And it gave me a fourth wife, and possibly even more. (An election opponent, David Lee, accused me of concealing various divorces from multiple wives, one of whom was definitively stated to be "Kathy", a nurse.

I have searched throughout Tennessee for Kathy and been unable to find her, but she lives happily in Swann family mythology. Kathy is responsible for many of my omissions and errors. Indeed, if you don't have a Kathy in your home life, you probably should invent one.

The experience of the judgeship was the ultimate impetus for my 2016 book Five Proofs of Christianity. You can read much of it for free at www.amazon.com/author/judgebillswann. Seeing so many lives pass before me, in 1985 I saw that I needed to figure out where I stood as to Christianity. The little 2016 book is my take on that. If my journey interests you, or if you wonder about your personal take on Christianity, or indeed whether you should bother with Christianity at all, you will enjoy my meandering reflections.

The book you are now holding deals with many things, among them local Knox County elected politics as seen from the perspective of an EOP degree holder. I hope this second book is both funny and serious. My thirteen years as a German academic informs much of the serious content of these two books — a different perspective on life than most people have.

Parenthetically, I maintain that an advanced (real) degree in any subject matter is great preparation for the practice of law. Why? Because knowing a different set of meticulous, demanding criteria helps you be relaxed about the arcane depths of legalisms.

But I do not pine away for my lost contacts with attorneys. Because soon I will begin a mediation practice devoted to family law, and once again I will have daily contact with the best people. I will limit the mediation to my expertise of thirty-two years; price my hourly for accessibility; and bring a judicial perspective to the process of "getting to yes."

I look forward eagerly to being with my lawyer friends again. Of course, we cannot get together in South Knox County: Having law degrees now, we cannot go to cock fights.

RICHARD, AGE 19

Not long ago I tried a case with a nineteen-year-old witness. Let's call him Richard. He had grown up in housing projects, and had just gotten out of jail. His older brother was still in state prison; his younger sister had become a mother at age twelve. Richard testified about his juvenile and adult convictions for car theft, burglary, and criminal impersonation.

But the picture wasn't right. He was articulate, had a large vocabulary. He was clearly intelligent. He had done well in school, very well, until the ninth grade. Then it had all fallen apart. Happily, the lawyer doing the direct examination asked exactly what I wanted to ask: "Richard, what went wrong in the ninth grade?"

He said, "Man, let me tell you smart don't get it. I mean, it's great and all that when you're a kid, and you're at the blackboard, and you've got the answer, and the teacher says, 'Very good, Richard.' But then you go back to your seat, and the cool kids are saying, 'Look at him, he's a nerd!'"

"I wanted to be like the cool kids. They were happy and everything. They were all stealing stuff. I wanted to be like them. So I started stealing stuff too."

Maybe this young man was just blowing smoke. It's entirely possible. Judges get a lot of smoke. But I thought of myself going into the ninth grade. [ENDNOTE 8] It was September 1956.

Webb School had started the year before, 1955, with four students. I sat there on the bench looking at Richard, a judge in my black robe, and wondered what would have become of him if he had been able to go to private school in the ninth grade. In 1956 I got to go to a school where learning was cool. Not stealing, not drugs. Where everyone had the same goal, to learn as much as possible. By age nineteen, Richard's age, I was in my second year of college.

What if Richard had been saved from his public school environment, as I was, plucked up, rescued? Well, Richard would still have been nineteen, but he would have been in college on a big scholarship. Because he was smart and well-spoken and a hard worker. He might even have had a clean record.

So, what's my point? Mr. Webb changed my life. He gave me the chance to excel. He made me successful. Without him, there wouldn't have been three straight years of his Latin instruction, no Ted Bruning for English, no George Turley for math, no B.E. Sharp for football. Mr. Webb put it all together — his school, and my life.

Too bad he didn't have a shot at doing that for Richard.

DREAMS

Let's turn for a bit to things more nebulous. Dreams. These often scary experiences fit ultimately, as I hope you will also find, in the category of faith.

I have recurrent dreams of Harvard College. You too may have recurrent dreams, troubling dreams, ones you need to deal with seriously. Perhaps my experience can help.

In my recurring departure from reality, what I call "Dream One," there are contiguous Cambridge streets which form shifting parallelograms displacing themselves around Dunster Street, like a Stephen King folding map ("Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," 1984).

I cannot get from Harvard Yard to Kirkland House. I keep trying. The streets don't connect as they should. I end up on Memorial Drive. I start over. Same result. Memorial Drive. Yes, there's the Charles River. But sometimes pieces of the Yale campus intrude as I try to walk from the Yard to Kirkland. This does not surprise me in the dream. Sometimes it's so bad I can't even find Harvard Square, which is silly, because for a year I lived there, across the street from The Harvard Coop.

This is simply — says a drugstore psychologist — that I am out of place at Harvard. I am unworthy. I don't belong there. "They" — that's the capital "They" — will find out soon and send me back home, back to Tennessee. Back to where I belong. More my speed. The dream is my lecture to myself, my galloping insecurity. On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe this is evil intervening in my life.

The second of the lost dreams, "Dream Two," involves test-taking at Harvard. In real life I always test well. But not in Dream Two. I am in the largest Harvard testing venue, Memorial Hall, taking an exam for a course I have never attended. (To my joy I later learned that hundreds of Harvard alumni have this dream.)

A variant of the dream, "Dream Three," a wickedly haunting version, is that I am enrolled for a normal Harvard load, four courses, but I don't know what they are. I cannot find out what they are. I cannot correct this situation, because I cannot get to University Hall (see Dream One) to find out what I registered for.

A variant on "Dream Three" is that I cannot get inside University Hall to see the posted reading lists for courses I might be in, so that at least I can buy the books at the Coop in Harvard Square (if I can get there) and read them. If I could just get close to University Hall, maybe I could ask someone what I was registered for. That someone could go in and read the posting for me, and then come out and tell me.

I stand outside, like poor Josef K. in Kafka's Trial, trying to find out what he is accused of doing.

Dreams One, Two, and Three, and their variants — says the drugstore psychologist — are clear statements that I am intellectually inadequate to the task of performing at Harvard. And yes, that "They" will soon find out, and send me back home. Back to Tennessee. Back to where I belong.

Needless to say after nights like these, I wake up tired and full of self doubt. What joy, The Eastern Education.

RACCOONS, OKRA, AND SQUASH

No sane thinking person, I hope, inflicts pain upon another sentient being. On the other hand, if raccoons and possums are killing your chickens, you must kill them. Trap them and kill them. Relocation does not work. I've tried it.

The problem with the killing is, when you take your .22 pistol and shoot a raccoon or possum in the head, it takes him thirty seconds of flopping around to bleed out and lie still. If you shoot him again, or even a third time, thinking he is in pain, it still takes the full thirty seconds from the first shot. No short cuts. It's not that the .22 is underpowered. A .38 gets the same thirty-second drama.

After forty-one raccoons and ten possums, I have concluded they are all dead after one shot, and that the drama is autonomic musculature. No pain. I hope. My authority is the chicken herself: Beheaded, she is instantly dead, but the body still runs around for thirty seconds, bumping into things. It's enough to make you a vegetarian.

On the other hand, growing okra is foolproof. Put the seed in the ground, and up it comes, eventually reaching six feet tall, pods everywhere. As in The Fantasticks, "Plant a Radish, Get a Radish."

But growing squash is not foolproof. The squash vine borer is a small beast from hell. In the month of July 2016 he defeated me for the sixth and last time. I will not plant squash again in Tennessee. He has won. He cannot be bested by chemicals, by crop rotation, or by shooting him in the head with a pistol.

If I can catch a squash vine borer, I will send him to Harvard and make him wander about lost with no reading list.