CLAIRWOOD BUILDING

I stepped inside the lobby of the Clairwold Building. What a huge skyscraper! 42 stories, tons of names on the seemingly endless directory. What was this lawyer’s name again? Finnegan. That was how I remembered it, the old rhyme “Finnegan, begin again, etc.” Well, the James Finnegan was an engineering firm, so it must be Malachi Finnegan. Law offices, 25th floor. Up in the elevator, with about nine others, I went. By the time we got to 25, it was only me and this bespectacled elderly gentleman, and he too got off at the 25th floor. In fact, I followed right behind him to the Finnegan Law Offices. He held the outer door for me, and said to me, “May I help you, my dear?” It turned out that HE was Malachi Finnegan. I explained that I was there on behalf of my father, who had been in a kind of accident. He had been trying to pry loose a wooden board in the basement of his home, and had bruised himself badly. The injury attorney asked if he’d been examined and diagnosed, and I told him yes. Just who is he going after, Finnegan wanted to know. “Well—I’m not really sure,” I admitted. My father had thought that maybe he could sue the construction company that had built our house. The only problem was: we weren’t the ones it was originally built for. The house I grew up in and in which my dad still lived was built in 1921. My parents hadn’t inhabited the place until 1962.