Bar None

Wherein Our Heroine Tells a Harrowing Tale.

It poured with rain this morning - and for some reason, as I sat curled up in my chair, it reminded me of the bar exam nine years ago. Reading Cooped Up, I understand that it is just about exactly nine years since I sat and took that storied exam.

My experience with the bar was, in many ways, a comedy of errors. Having spent the time since graduation studying feverishly, I went to my mother's for the last few days before the exam. My hometown is a pastoral little place, and the woods where my mother lives are quiet. I'm not sure that the tranquility of my surroundings really helped my jangled nerves any, but it was a sensible idea on the face of it.

The day before the exam, I hopped into my car to head for Maine, which was to be Day One of the three-day ordeal of taking two bar exams in one go. Approximately two miles from my mother's house, my car began to roar like a demented lion with a toothache. My exhaust system was shot, and suddenly, so were the last remains of my nerves. I went back to Mom's and called her at work, inches from tears. I was a student living on a patchwork of grants, loans, and work-study. There was no room in the budget for expensive auto repairs. Mom told me to call Steve, a family friend who also owned a car repair place, and that she would loan me the cash to get the car fixed. After a couple of hours of sitting in the waiting room of his shop, staring blankly at my study notes for the bar, Steve came out and told me that he couldn't locate the parts needed to fix my vehicle - BUT - he noted, in response to my despairing, hollow-eyed stare - he would spring for a rental that would get me to Maine and back. "Go - pass your exam and don't worry about a thing," he said. "Come get your car when it's over."

So, off to my apartment in Maine, to try and laugh off the misfortune with my roommate. I doubt I slept much that night, though I don't remember. I do know that the Maine Bar, given in a massive ballroom, was an exercise in intense frustration. A section of definitions, which had been part of the exam for about fifteen years, was replaced by a "short answer" section that carved the test into funny, spiky little segments of time (the bar is almost as much of a time-management exercise as it is a test in legal knowledge - spending twelve minutes on a ten-minute answer means you have to carve those two minutes from somewhere else, and that way lies absolute madness as your overages cascade into a complete loss of control). Trying to keep track of how long I had been answering this five-minute, or that twenty-minute, or those ten-minute questions just about sent me around the bend. On top of that, taking an exam in a big room with about 200-300 other people somehow amplifies the tension, and worst of all, they handed out so few blue books that the exam-takers looked at the exam-givers in astonishment. "No problem," the exam-givers said. "Simply raise your hand and we will bring you another one." Of course, when I raised my hand for a fresh book, one of the proctors came over to ask me what the problem was - and had to return to the front of the cavernous ballroom for a book when I told him that was what I wanted. Screaming in frustration is frowned upon at the bar exam, so I simply clenched my teeth and got on with things.

So why did the rain remind me of the bar? Well, tune in tomorrow. Because the thrills and chills ain't over yet, folks.

Posted: Wednesday - July 28, 2004 at 08:57 AM | |