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We had a tonsillectomy in the family last week and my wife spent a couple days out of town, assigned to kid-wrangling duties. I called, just to see how things were going, and talked to one of my grandchildren.
“Papa, where are you?” she asked.
“I’m at my home,” I said.
“But Grammy is here!” she said.
“Yeah, I know, sweetheart. But I had to work.”
Nothing but silence on her end. I’m used to that – half the people I know don’t think I even have a job, but I’d like to believe my own family would know better.
I tried to think of a reason she would buy as to why I would be missing all the excitement. Finally I said, “I have to feed the cats.”
“Oh. Okay,” she said.
Makes me a little tired to think that my granddaughter, the light of my life, considers feeding the cats twice a day to be my most significant contribution to society.
The sad part is that I’m not sure she’s wrong.
A few years ago after one of my books was published, a newspaper sent a photographer to our farm. They needed an action shot of me at work to go along with an article they planned to write.
It wasn’t easy to come by.
My normal workday consists of me staring at a computer screen for a while, interrupted by trips to the kitchen to find something to eat.
Sometimes I learn back in my chair with my hands behind my head, close my eyes, and meditate. I don’t know why someone becomes a press photographer, but I’m willing to bet it isn’t to take pictures of that.
We live in a complicated world and I bet I’m not the only one who could have trouble explaining their daily duties to a four year old in a way that would make sense. I wonder when that happened? For about three decades, it was pretty easy to explain to anyone what I did. I raised food, for people to eat. There used to be a lot of people like me, but there aren’t nearly as many now, just as there used to be people who made cars and trucks, people who fixed the things that broke and people who built the houses that we live in. Oh, those jobs still exist, but in fewer and fewer numbers.
It seems to me that as a country we are spending more and more time doing more and more things that don’t matter. I realize that I’m edging into curmudgeon territory here, but I have to admit that it’s territory where I’m fairly comfortable.
I think two things happen when there is too much attention paid to things that do not matter. First, if you spend your days getting paid for work where it’s hard to find some sort of progress to hang your hat on, a level of self-contempt and frustration begins to develop that can erode your stomach lining and dim the sun.
The other thing that can happen, and this is worse, is you can convince yourself that your meaningless job really does mean something. If you’ve ever run into someone who insisted that every “t” be crossed on a form that will just go into a file never to be looked at again, you know what I’m talking about. As a country, we’re reaching a point where I sometimes feel like it’s impossible to get anything done; the dead weight of paperwork and process stifles initiative and dampens progress.
Just something to think about on a January day. Me, I’ve got to get to work.
The cats are hungry.
Copyright 2012 Brent Olson
