Saturday, July 24, 2004
A Fish Story
Not a day goes by when Max isn't engaged in some kind of fantasy play, like sweeping imaginary animals out of the house or taking the car for a spin around the block. One of his favorite fantasy games is fishing, and today as he dangled one end of a bent yardstick off the bed, he exclaimed, "I've got a fish!" I started asking him questions about his catch: How big is the fish? What color is the fish? Where did you catch the fish? Max was playing along, amplifying on his fishing experience with each answer.
There's a basic tenet of trial law that when a lawyer is interrogating a witness on the stand, he/she should never ask a question to which he/she doesn't already know the answer. During the year that I played at becoming a trial lawyer, I heard numerous war stories about the unexpected and often disasterous consequences of asking one question too many. (Remember the prosecutor asking O.J. Simpson to try on the glove that didn't fit?)
Today on my fantasy expedition with Max, I asked one question too many: Is the fish a boy or a girl? Max gave me a withering look and said, as if I'd just missed the entire premise of the story, "It's a FISH." And with that, our fishing trip was over.
There's a basic tenet of trial law that when a lawyer is interrogating a witness on the stand, he/she should never ask a question to which he/she doesn't already know the answer. During the year that I played at becoming a trial lawyer, I heard numerous war stories about the unexpected and often disasterous consequences of asking one question too many. (Remember the prosecutor asking O.J. Simpson to try on the glove that didn't fit?)
Today on my fantasy expedition with Max, I asked one question too many: Is the fish a boy or a girl? Max gave me a withering look and said, as if I'd just missed the entire premise of the story, "It's a FISH." And with that, our fishing trip was over.
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