Idle Work

I stroll through my tangled garden, lingering over the coned bud of a soon-to-be zinnia, stopping to marvel at the bloom of a New Dawn rose, and encouraging the basil volunteers that returned from last winter's seed.  I brush pollen from a plastic Adirondack and sit, waiting for the fat cardinal and his mate to come share another meal at my feeder.  Unlike me, a mockingbird is hard at work, practicing his latest list of calls.  I sip my second cup of coffee, noticing the higher-than-it-should-be grass of the backyard.  Then the guilt sets in.

I live with a woman who begins each day working backwards from bedtime, filling in her day in fifteen-minute blocks: visit sick friend, buy fish, call the bank about that service charge; there's
something for each space.  Sometimes she looks up from her list-making and asks, "What are you doing today?"

"Um, I'm not sure yet."

After all, the semester just ended Monday, and this is my first week of summer vacation.  I've spent the last nine months walking the middle ground between lecturing and conjoling students who sometimes don't share my enthusiasm for English Composition.  Not to mention all the weekends spent grading, grading, and grading some more, working through stacks of essays, ranging from plagiarized interpretations of Emily Dickinson to the evils of global warming.

But that grass is getting high; the car could stand a wash and wax; my clothes closet is a mish-mash of winter's wool sweaters and summer aloha shirts.  In short, I should get busy.

After all, I'm the daughter of two workaholics.  Each was the oldest child of a large, bitterly poor, family; they were taught how to work rather than taught how to read, an unimportant skill to sharecroppers in East Tennessee of the 1930s.  At fifteen, my mother nabbed a paying job at the local movie theater; my dad worked for a son-less doctor, baling hay and cutting tobacco.  At seventeen, he enlisted in the army for an easier life, taking my mother with him.  Sent to Korea, he led brigade after brigade into battle while my mother picked up work at a local diner, serving breakfast and lunch, searching under plates for a couple of quarters.

When he returned, he supervised the warehouses at New Cumberland Army Depot by day and worked as a bartender at the Officer's Club at night.  My mom worked the service counter at a rent-a-car agency at the airport fulltime and waited tables on the side.  They were great providers if not the best parents.  My sister and I seldom saw them, and we learned early how to survive on TV Dinners and our own self-discipline.

Late in life, crippled from rhuematoid arthritis, my dad told me, "The only thing I miss is working."
True to his words, he spent his last incoherent hours lying in the hospital babbling about "the inventory" and how we needed to "get going."

Oten my idleness seems disrespectful to my dad's legacy. But I don't want to lie on my deathbed with life passing as one big blur of work.

Instead, I want to remember the nervous hop of a bluejay across my weedy lawn, the smell of the confederate jasmine that's overtaking a tree out back.  In the winter of life, I want to still find joy in the way flowers return uninvited each spring.  I want to remember the way my son looks when he plays the piano or runs soaking wet from the waves.  If this is what it means to be idle, I'm willing to work for it.