I brought a chocolate sheet cake to work the other day.  I’d asked for an “outer space” theme for the decoration, and the cake decorator at my favorite bakery didn’t disappoint.  There was a quarter moon, and a sky full of stars, and even the planet Earth in blue and green frosting, showing the Western Hemisphere side of things.

The reason for the celebration was to mark the ten-year anniversary of my joining the staff of the Sheboygan District Attorney’s office as a state prosecutor.

The “outer space” theme was to mark the fact that in those ten years, I’ve driven more than 130,000 miles back and forth from home to office.  If you look that up, you’ll find it’s more than half the distance from the earth to the moon.

Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “going the distance”!  

The scene in the courtroom still haunts me ten years later.

I remember the tears that sprang hot to my eyes as I shut the door behind me and walked down the corridor, thinking “I am not tough enough to do this job.” I was a law student then, a seasoned criminal prosecutor now. And from time to time, out of nowhere, still comes that memory. It is seared into my consciousness, a testament to “collateral damage,” and a mother’s grief — two mothers, in fact — and consequences reaped by horrific acts, and how nothing in life, either evil or good, ever happens in a vacuum.

But first, a bit about my job.