Life is curious.

About a month ago, I was stressing out about my jam-packed month of May when I had a troubling thought: “What if I get jury duty?”

About a week later, as if on cue, my jury-duty summons arrived in the mail.

I hadn’t been on a jury since the 1980s, when I served on a sequestered murder-trial panel. The thought of juggling vacations at work, child care responsibilities and civic duty this month made me dizzy.

(Save your e-mails. I am aware this is poor citizenship, and it sounds especially whiny at a time when brave Americans are putting their lives on the line.)

Still, my wife noticed me at the kitchen table one night with my face buried in my hands.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“This,” I said, pushing the jury-duty summons across the table. “I have jury duty. This is a completely unmanageable situation.”

Meanwhile, my slightly confused 6-year-old son began bragging to his friends that Daddy would soon be going to “jail.”

I thought about asking the judge for a deferment, but a friend told me not to bother. Once, he said, he heard a judge read aloud someone’s “please-release-me” letter, I guess for laughs.

Trial by jury is one of our basic American rights, and we all must participate to make it work. I get that. It’s just that in today’s busy world, many of us find it hard to take one day off, much less spend two weeks on hold.

It doesn’t help that there are whole groups — doctors, lawyers, preachers, pharmacists, teachers, accountants and the self-employed — who can self-defer from jury duty just by checking a box on the summons.

Accountants? Please.

I discovered that, coincidentally, Tennessee lawmakers were voting this month to bring the jury selection process into the 21st century. New legislation may lift some exemptions, raise fines for people who fail to appear for jury duty and give other folks more latitude to pick when they want to serve.

Having just finished my two weeks of service, I have some suggestions for more sweeping reforms:

* Raise pay. Jurors in Hamilton County make $13 a day. Raise it to $50 a day, which is about the going rate for substitute school teachers, and you will have a much more eager pool of jurors. (Thankfully, most employers must pay their workers for pay lost to jury duty.)

* At the same time, the state should do away with all exemptions and deferments based on professions. Sequestering a mother with small children, while letting a young, single professional serve jury duty at will, is beyond insulting. Also, it reinforces the working-class belief that professionals with good lobbyists get all the breaks.

* Let people who wish to skip jury duty entirely buy a deferment at a price that will completely finance the pay-hike for sitting jurors. A deferment fee of, say, $300 would make an interesting choice for a lot of busy people, and they would still be required to serve at some point in the future.

Wouldn’t affluent people just buy their way out of jury duty? I say today’s system of exemptions and deferments already favors high-earning professionals.

* Don’t use voter-registration roles to pick jurors. For many people, the rigors of jury duty amount to a modern-day poll tax. History tells us this not a good idea under any circumstances.

* Here’s a radical idea: Allow volunteers to sign up for jury duty. If an all-volunteer army is a good idea, why not an all-volunteer jury pool?

I noticed last week that there were plenty of people eager to put their years of “Law and Order” watching to good use.

* Higher pay for jurors might also attract more young jurors, who were woefully under-represented during my two-week stint.

In fact, if we can ever figure out how to have virtual courtrooms on YouTube and let jurors deliberate by text messaging for $50 a day, our jury-duty problems could be solved.