"I had failed.
I had never in my life failed a test. . . . But I'd blown it with the bar. I was ashamed, sure that I'd let down every person who'd ever taught, encouraged, or employed me."Like Michelle, I failed my first bar exam. It wasn't because we weren't smart or didn't study hard. It just happens to a lot of people when the two-day test is extremely tricky to keep the passage rates low. It was only 58% on my first try of the Maryland bar exam and only 56% six months later when I did pass. Michelle passed the Illinois exam on her second try too.
The second one also hit me joyfully:
He worked late at night in a small room we'd converted to a study at the rear of our apartment--a crowded, book-strewn bunker I referred to lovingly as the Hole. I'd sometimes go in, stepping over his piles of paper to sit on the ottoman in front of his chair while he worked, trying to lasso him with a joke and a smile, to tease him back from whatever far-off fields he'd been galloping through. He was good-humored about my intrusions, but only if I didn't stay to long.
Barack, I've come to understand, is the sort of person who needs a hole, a closed off little warren where he can read and write undisturbed. It's like a hatch that opens directly into the spacious skies of his brain. . . ."Socially-distancing in my "hole," I finally go around to reading Becoming by Michelle Obama.
