Newlan was momentarily startled by the letter and he complained to himself, “Oh no, jury duty…not again.”
In the grand scheme of things, a day of jury duty should be no big deal, but for Frank Newlan it was a very big deal. You see, Newlan was the type of person whose internal balance was easily set off-kilter by anything that caused him to deviate from his normal routine, and so the very thought of having to go to jury duty turned his stomach and filled him with all sorts of irrational fears.
Newlan wouldn’t have minded so much, but the majority of his friends and family members had rarely, if ever, been summoned to jury duty, whereas this unwanted invitation, if his memory served him correctly, tallied up to his seventh time being called upon to perform his civic duty.
Newlan contended that there had to be something wrong with the database that made the random selections for jury duty summonses…or even more likely, he figured that the system was purposely rigged to repeatedly solicit suckers like him who always showed up and never complained about it (and on top of everything else, Newlan worked as a programmer/analyst at a local university so he knew a little bit about how these computer systems worked, which in his mind gave added credence to his theory).
As a matter of fact, as soon as Newlan got up to his apartment, he headed straight for his records, which he meticulously maintained, to determine when it was exactly that he had last served on jury duty. He was positive that it had been less than 3 years ago, and if that was the case, he could get himself excused, since by law, no one could be called back to jury duty less than 3 years from their previous date of service.
Before even putting the case of beer into the fridge, Newlan plopped himself down in his office chair and began sifting anxiously through his file cabinet in search of the documentation supporting his claim. And although he was sure that the “Certificate of Trial Juror Service” documents were buried somewhere within that metal drawer, he was having a hard time locating them.
“I guess I’m not as organized as I thought,” muttered Newlan as he rifled through files of tax returns, bank statements, mutual fund records, and God know what else he could fit into that tiny little file cabinet.
Newlan was a touch neurotic about saving not only financial records, but also a lifetime’s worth of mementos, which over the years had become rather unmanageable, until it had reached the point where that beat-up file cabinet drawer of his had been filled to the brim with just about every useless morsel of information you could ever imagine. Among other things, he had greeting cards dating back 30 years, random newspaper clippings, wedding invitations, report cards, photographs, and of course love letters; lots of faded love letters dispersed from the hands of the countless old flames whose remnants littered his past like the rubbish scattered across Boston’s Esplanade after a Fourth of July fireworks display.
And so, organized or not, whenever Newlan had the need to search for something in his personal pile of priceless junk, it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. And to further exacerbate the issue, he would routinely become inexorably sidetracked by the stack of crinkled letters which were sent to him courtesy of all the girlfriends who had let him down gently with the familiar “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse. Astonishingly enough, even now, after all these years, he found that wading through these bitterly poignant correspondences could still cut him to the quick.
Why Newlan insisted on keeping these tattered old missives around as a constant reminder of his emotional bloodlettings, even he didn’t quite understand, but for some reason, he had to look back, he always looked back…and it never seemed to fail that every time he had the occasion to sort his way through these frozen snapshots from his antiquity, he would invariably find himself being transported counterclockwise back through space-and-time in some sort of a trance-like daze.
Make no mistake about it, Newlan broke a few hearts in his day, but he also had his own heart broken a time or two as well, and now, pushing 50, he had long since reached the point where he had hardened his heart, and he wouldn’t even consider letting anyone get too close to him.
It had literally been decades since Newlan reconciled with himself that he was bound to be a life-long bachelor, and for the most part, he was OK with it.
“Sure it’s nice to have someone to lay down beside you,” he would sometimes rationalize, but on the other hand most of his friends were married and miserable, or divorced multiple times, so in the end he decided, “who needs it.”
Newlan had plenty of female companions, and he probably got laid more than the lion’s share of his married friends, who, much to his amazement, didn’t even sleep in the same beds as their spouses due to supposed back pains, snoring problems, insomnia, and a whole host of psychosexual issues.
Newlan’s lifestyle agreed with him, and he unapologetically paid no mind to all the people who felt otherwise about the way he lived, regardless of how often they asked him when he was going to settle down. He kind of enjoyed fostering the romantic notion that he was this untamed bachelor who was considered by one-and-all as being some sort of mysterious contradiction of a human being; part ladies man, part loner, part loyal friend, part extremely private person…all of which added up to one big impenetrable puzzle of a man.
But all that aside, I guess you could say that Newlan was just a sentimental old fool, and as he read through letter after letter, he fell deeper and deeper into a mind-numbing time warp, until he was almost completely lost in one of his infamously lofty omnipotent dream-states; a daunting condition that had the ability to incapacitate him for hours at a time.
Luckily for Newlan however, he was snapped out of his stupor by the sound of the telephone ringing, which he in turn ignored (he made it a dedicated practice of never answering the phone during the dinner hours of 5 to 7 PM unless he knew in advance specifically who it was on the other end of the line, and exactly what it was they wanted).
Consequently, with this temporary “blast-from-the-past” diversion behind him, Newlan promptly went back to the task of locating the jury duty documents which provided him with the indisputable proof that he had, on multiple occasions, done his part to placate the powerful forces who control our system of justice.
After about 15 minutes of exasperated searching, Newlan finally found the documents stashed in a folder, along with his employment records, and he tensely canvassed through the forms until he was able to pinpoint the exact date of his last jury duty experience.
“Friday, February 4th, 2005…son of bitch,” mumbled Newlan, “it has been over 3 years after all.”
He could have sworn that it had only been a couple of years ago, but then he reasoned, “oh well, I guess it’s legit…like the old saying goes, ‘tempest fugit…time flies’.”
And so with the validity of the summons firmly established, Newlan swiftly resigned himself to the inevitable as he reluctantly unsealed the envelope and skimmed through the booklet of Standard Juror Information, which he was already all too familiar with by now from his previous “tours of duty”.
Irked though he may have been, Newlan conscientiously perused the first page of the corresponding official government document, from the letterhead right on down to the page number, and he scanned the details into his memory banks, making special note of the pertinent information:
Summon for Jury Service
You are herby summoned to serve as a TRIAL JUROR commencing on:
Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 8:00 AM
Middlesex Superior Courthouse, 3rd Floor
200 Trade center, Woburn, MA 01801
He then grimaced and shrugged his shoulders in a “what are you gonna do” sort of gesture as he tossed the envelope down on his desk where it would sit for almost 3 months until that fateful morning in early June of 2008; a day that would change his life…forever.