Sunday, February 13, 2011

"...And Built a Bridge to Span the Tide"

I’m going to follow Jason’s lead and reveal the inspiration that led to BridgeBuilder’s formation and why I practice the way I do.  I’ve got several attorneys in my family, and in fact, I am a third generation attorney.  Yet all of the attorneys in my family had litigation practices and backgrounds.  When I was preparing to graduate from law school, I had no desire to do my work in the courtroom.  I set my eyes on a more transactional practice and so that’s what I did.  I joined a firm in the Liberty area and my practice gravitated toward business and estate planning.  I’ve maintained these areas of focus since then. 

Yet, the longer I practiced, the more I desired to limit my practice to estate planning.  In part, that desire likely originated when I was in high school.  At the time, my family owned a small commercial bank and was in the process of working on tax and succession planning with tax attorneys.  I was fascinated with the planning even though I nowhere near understood the complexities.

Fast forward to May of 2008.  I was working for my present firm and beginning stages of narrowing my practice to estate planning.  At the time, my grandfather was ill and one day I was scheduled to take in an exit planning seminar at a local bank.  At the seminar, the presenter offered a poem.  The name of the poem was The Bridge Builder by Will Allen Dromgoole.

An old man, going a lone highway,
Came at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast and deep and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim-
That sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned, when he reached the other side,
And built a bridge to span the tide.

"Old man," said a fellow pilgrim near,
"You are wasting strength in building here.
Your journey will end with the ending day;

You never again must pass this way.
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build you the bridge at the eventide?"

The builder lifted his old gray head.
"Good friend, in the path I have come," he said,
"There followeth after me today
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him."

Something about that poem resonated deep within me and I saw my grandfather as the “old man” in the poem.  The struggles that he had endured and the sacrifices that he made, they all benefited me…they gave me the opportunities that I have had to succeed.  Later that May my grandfather passed away and I had the poem read at his funeral.

So when Jason and I were searching for an identity to our practice group, the poem’s imagery mirrored the type of planning we sought to serve our clients with.  As Jason recently mentioned in one of his posts, “planning is not something you do for yourself; it is something you do for your loved ones.”  No one knew that better than the “old man” in the poem…no one knew that better than my grandfather.

In Memory of

Melvin Eugene Griffin

1925-2008

BridgeBuilder – Plans for Life

Garrett Griffin