SLEEPY TIME BLUES

Work has never been a scary thing for me. I had “chores” to teach me that everyone must do their part to make a household free of slaves. My “wage” was being able to live in our house and eat the food provided for me, without feeling guilty that I was not pulling my weight.

When I was young I tried to avoid work, looking at it as a burden but as the years went by, it has really been a blessing. I was the oldest of seven kids and work kind of became my lot as soon as I was big enough to lend a hand in whatever capacity. Perhaps one of my first tasks was babysitting my siblings. After a while I was taught to wash dishes, do laundry, iron clothes, mow the yard, pull weeds, etc. and many years later, shovel snow. What is frightening today, is not being able to work, to look around and see others working and knowing that I’m either too sick or otherwise unable to work.

Someone once said that if you are less apt to work, break time and vacations are much less meaningful. It didn’t take long to figure out that many mundane, boring jobs could be made easier to bear if I would listen to music while I worked. It was fun to discover that as I grew, others would actually pay me for the work I did.

One of my first paying jobs was delivering newspapers in our neighborhood. I started out helping neighbor boys with their routes and later got a route of my own. It paid very little for the amount of labor it required but etched the work ethic ever more vividly in my mind. I would rise up before daylight and school to pick up the stack of papers for my route, fold them into my newspaper saddle bags, throw them over my bike and peddle off for delivery.

The job had to be done every day, whether it rained or shined, was cold or foggy, school day or holiday, whether I was sick or sleepy, it just didn’t matter. If I had some really big excuse for not distributing paper that day, I could try to get a substitute, but that was very difficult to do and usually meant you had to pay someone, more than it was worth, out of your own pocket to do your job for you and then probably do it wrong.

After school and homework and household chores, there wasn’t a whole lot of time for play or sleep. Many was the day that I walked or rode my bike to school, feeling tired from the day before. After I got older, I was able to get a motorcycle paper route which didn’t exhaust me as much but was still a bother if you wanted to plan anything else. Motorcycle routes were longer because you could travel faster. Then there was the joy of people complaining that their paper was not delivered properly or those who wouldn’t pay their paper bill at the end of the month.

Today, I seldom even read a newspaper. Between the Internet, radio and TV news shows, there is little reason and besides, there is so much bad news, it can get depressing. My granddaughter has the right idea though. Sometimes all that work can wear you out and all you want to do is look forward to a nap, regardless of wherever you are.