Let me be up front about this: a little more than fifteen years ago I knew nothing about the then relatively new legal practice specialty known as “Elder Law.” Medicaid vs. Medicare? You mean there’s a difference? What the heck is a QTIP trust anyway? I was reading, writing, teaching, and thinking about many interesting things—the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Confrontation Clause, the role of mandatory arrest laws in combating domestic violence—but the legal issues facing seniors were not among them. My course load consisted of various civil and criminal procedure classes, with a dash of intellectual property and feminist legal theory thrown in to keep things interesting. To be honest, I had never even heard of Elder Law. So, how does someone whose early writing comprised theoretical and empirical articles about civil and criminal procedure become fascinated with, and intellectually embroiled in, the practice-oriented particulars of a field as prosaic and academically irrelevant as Elder Law? More specifically, how does someone whose fantasy was to be the next Mary Kay Kane end up co-authoring a casebook and a treatise on Elder Law and eventually joining the Board of Directors of the National Academy of Elder Law? And how has the varied nature of my pre-Elder Law life affected both my philosophy about teaching Elder Law and the content of my courses?