On the afternoon of the second Thursday in November, US District Court Judge Barrie Foote as she preferred ate her lunch alone, reading her New York Times. She sat at the head of the long polished mahogany table in the library of her chambers in the courthouse on Main Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, luxuriating in her daily forty minutes of silence. When she had finished eating tuna fish with fat-free mayonnaise, shredded lettuce and tomato chunks in a pita pocket; Diet Coke; large coffee, black she picked up the telephone handset and said,

"Ask Sandy to come in, please."

She gathered up the waxed paper, flimsy paper napkins and unused packets of salt and pepper that had come with the sandwich and stuffed them back into the bag along with the hollow red plastic straw that Spiro, the counterman at Dino's Deli always included, so that she might stir into her coffee either the two packets of sugar or the two packets of Sweet 'n Low that she also never used and lobbed the parcel with her left hand in a low arc over the table, applying a little backspin, faultlessly thunking it into the metal wastebasket in the corner. "It's a three, my friends, an' nothin' but net," she said softly. "Crowd in this place's goin' wild."

Two years before, during the interval between her appointment by President Clinton and congressional confirmation and her swearing-in, she had told an interviewer from the Springfield Union News that she thought 'nurture outweighs nature in the makeup of the adult animal it's supposed to, anyway. If you're born lucky, and you pay attention, it does. Overlook either one, odds are you're dead meat.

"Nature first. We're born with what our parents' genes give us. They couldn't do much about what they gave us to inherit. So that made me then a light-skinned African-American female infant. But a lucky one.