Category Archives: Work

“Sit Down.” “No, I Can’t Sit Down.”

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There can be no joy in living without joy in work.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274; Italian philosopher and theologian, often seen as a foundational figure of modern thought.)

The Sheep’s Rain this year nearly did me in.

“What the hell is the Sheep’s Rain?” someone just bleated.

If you don’t know, don’t bother asking Google. I just did and found nothing. Absolutely nothing.

So let me tell you all about the Sheep’s Rain, just as my mother told me all about it when I was a child. Without fail, at least in Virginia (where she grew up) and in West Virginia (where she lived after she married my dad) a cold rain always fell around the middle of May, the temps dropped to lower than usual, and the rain kept falling for ten days or so. Farmers never sheared their sheep until after that cold rainy spell in May. They knew that if they did, their sheep would develop pneumonia and die.

Having lived in West Virginia, DC, and Virginia for my entire life–except for five years in South Carolina–I have witnessed the Sheep’s Rain every year since my mother explained it to me when I was a child.

However, when I started thinking about this post, I started asking people I know in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where I live if they had ever heard of the Sheep’s Rain. No one–not even farmers–had any idea what I was talking about.

Who knows. Maybe it was a term used by farmers in Patrick County where my mother grew up. Maybe she, in turn, kept right on referring to the Sheep’s Rain down through the years, dutifully passing the name of this annual weather phenomenon on to her children who still talk about it.

I always believed my mother, of course, and it goes without saying that I still do.

But it does seem to me that I should be able to give you a far better explanation of the Sheep’s Rain than the one that I just gave. Agreed? Thank you. Let’s all have a brief learning moment. I simply must see what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has to say. I’ll be right back.

Well, I have good news and bad news.

I’ll start with the bad news. The OED has no recorded usage of the Sheep’s Rain. Ever.

I am flabbergasted.

Here’s the good news. I will send this post to the OED editors so that they can use it as the first-known printed usage of the term Sheep’s Rain. I never dreamt that this post would immortalize me, my mother, and the Sheep’s Rain. Wouldn’t it be truly funny if it did! Well, it might. Stranger things have happened.

Now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way–thank God for small mercies–let me get back to sharing with you why the Sheep’s Rain this year nearly did me in.

A warm spell lulled me into believing that spring was slipping softly and certainly into an early summer. I went ahead and moved all of my houseplants–tropicals and cacti–deck side.

I convinced myself that the Sheep’s Rain might just pass us by this year.

In fact, I started doing heavy pruning, weedwhacking, and brush cutting. I had a plan that would keep me busy for at least a week.

But to my surprise, the Sheep’s Rain snuck up on me and put a wet, cold damper on my plans to work outdoors.

No problem. I am a resourceful fellow, not easily outdone.

I simply shifted my focus to indoors. I cleaned the house. That was a marvelous solution for the first day of the Sheep’s Rain that imprisoned me indoors unexpectedly.

Fine. I can be resourceful for more than one day. Day two found me joyfully polishing the interiors of all my windows. My entire home seemed to be one window after another, bouncing their sparkling, streak-free reflections everywhere. I was finished by noon.

I spent the afternoon re-reading George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo for the fifth time.

Then I leisured my way through my dinner prep as the fire roared red in my kitchen fireplace.

Bedtime came early, and the next morning came even earlier as day three of the Sheep’s Rain imprinted itself on my deepening pain.

No problem. My resourcefulness prompted me to bike longer, pump iron longer, read longer, research longer, nap longer, and take longer for dinner.

But. Geez. How much of a good thing can a mountain man take?

I mean. Don’t get me wrong. I love–absolutely love–all of those things. But in their midst, I need something else that I wasn’t getting.

And that’s why the Sheep’s Rain this year nearly did me in.

What I needed–what I wasn’t getting–were the benefits that go hand in hand with hard work.

Stop right now. Don’t even go there. I’m fully aware that cooking and cleaning and reading and research and writing and biking and lifting weights all require hard work, sometimes far more than others are willing to acknowledge.

But I needed to get down and dirty with manual work that leaves the muscles I know feeling sorer than they’ve ever felt before, and that leaves the muscles I don’t know, knowing that they had damned well better get with the program.

I needed to raise my 8-pound maul mid-air and thrust it back down with such force that round after round of oak would pile up in mound after mound of split wood.

I needed to bring order to all of that mounded chaos at day’s end by rhythmically stacking it all into perfectly measured and balanced cords of firewood.

I needed spurt after spurt after spurt of endorphins to be released, to pump me up, to clear my brain, and to make me see rainbow after rainbow after rainbow. Rainbows of hope, arching over me, arching around me, arching behind me, and arching ahead of me. Rainbows. Hope. Everywhere.

Somehow the more that I write about it, the more I’m coming to realize that the Sheep’s Rain this year really didn’t nearly do me in.

Instead, it impressed upon me what I have realized so many times before. I need manual labor to spur me on with my creative labors and my intellectual labors.

Instead, it impressed upon me the wish that when my now is done and my forever begins, I want to keep right on working.

When I reach my home in that land somewhere–that world to come somewhere–I want to be of like mind with that old gospel song:

“Sit down.”

“No, I can’t sit down. I just got to Heaven, and I got to walk around.”

And you had damned well better believe that I won’t be walking around gawking at those twelve gates of single pearls and those transparent streets of pure gold.

I’ll be walking around with a can of Pledge in one hand and a microfiber dust cloth in the other. Somebody, after all, will have to keep all those splendiferous furnishings clean. I won’t mind at all.

After I’m done with dusting, I hope to find a hand plow so that I can start tilling all those fertile fields and get an early start on gardening. From time to time, maybe I’ll get to work up a heady sweat by moving rocks as big as the biggest boulders I’ve ever moved in my whole life.

After the gardening and the dusting, maybe I can work in the bakery for a few hours a day. I’ll be sure to bring along a little jar of my sourdough starter, grown from spores back home on my mountaintop in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. And, for good measure, I’ll bring extra copies of “Oh, No! Sourdough!” for folks who just want to sit around all day, reading.

As for me, one thing’s for sure. I won’t be sitting around, and I won’t be sitting down. Whenever I reach my home in whatever world is yet to come, I’ll be smackdab at the head of the line, looking for work, because my joy in living is upgirded by my joy in working, now and forever.

Human Being, Not Human Doing

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Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961; Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst; father of analytical psychology.)

The rain was steady and heavy all night. I say “all night,” but I’m not really certain when it started. It’s not as if it awakened me, and I looked at the clock and whispered to my sleeping self, “Ah, it’s raining.” But I could hear it, even as it lulled me into a deeper and more restful slumber.

When I awakened, the raindrops were pearling their way down the window panes. As I lay in bed–looking and listening–I knew that Plan B would govern my day.

Plan A had been to continue my yard work. This year, my focus is more on “taking out” than on “putting in.” I have lots and lots of shrubs–especially rhododendrons–that have outgrown the spaces where I planted them. For some, a heavy pruning will restore their vitality and their appearance. For others, pruning will neither restore their vitality nor their beauty. They have to be removed. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Pruning. Removing. Hauling truckload after truckload to the landfill. That was my Plan A.

But I had checked the weather forecast before going to bed and knew the strong likelihood of rain.

That was when I came up with Plan B. I could spend the day doing some extra indoor biking. Then, I could start rearranging the artwork in my office–a task that I have needed to tackle for months, but one that I have managed to avoid doing with full success. And betwixt and between, I could make Ukrainian Sauerkraut Soup–perfect for a chilly, rainy-day dinner–and I could bake Jumbo Sourdough Banana Nut Muffins–a perfect way to use up this week’s sourdough discard. 

It was settled. Plan B, it would be.

But before I started to execute that plan, I perused my smartphone news. As I did, I was ever aware of the rain, still falling hypnotically. For a second, I considered stopping the pendulum on my grandfather clock so that the only sound would be the rhythm of the falling rain. Then, in the next second, I looked out the window onto my deck. I could see the raindrops dropping one by one off the scalloped edges of my Asian patio umbrella–all wet with green bamboo, red sun, pink blossoms, and blue happiness. And for another second, I considered trying to count the drops as they fell, starting at the 6:30 position on the umbrella, proceeding clockwise, counting every sliding raindrop, working my way back home, and then beginning anew.

As I considered those thoughts, I glanced down at the next news flash to discover an article from Open Culture: “Stephen King Recommends 96 Books that Aspiring Writers Should Read.” I knew immediately that it was not newsy at all. I had read that same article nearly a decade ago. I perused the list anyway, discovering that I could not claim to have read any more of those books now than I could claim to have read them then. As I reached the end of the article, I found that King had updated his list: “Stephen King Creates a List of 82 Books for Aspiring Writers (to Supplement an Earlier List of 96 Books.)” I scanned that list quickly.

Somehow, I was brought back to the reality of my grandfather clock still ticking. I had not stopped the clock as I had considered doing. I was brought back to the reality of the raindrops still falling off the scalloped edges of my Asian patio umbrella. I had not counted the raindrops as I had considered doing.

I was brought back to the haunting reality that my day was wasting away.

I still needed to meditate so that I could get started with my Plan B. Meditation does not come easy for me, even after years of daily practice. I’m finding, though, that I can sit with myself for longer and longer periods of time without my mind being pulled in the direction of all the other things that I could be doing.

But on this day, when the “all” of the day seemed to be wrapped up in the “all” of the rain, I decided to sit for a shorter-than-usual spell. Ten minutes. No more. I had things to do on my Plan B.

I was drawn to an 11-minute mindfulness session. Surely, I could spare an extra minute, especially since the title tugged at me: “Human Being, Not Human Doing.”

“If you’re like most people, you probably feel like you have to be constantly doing something.”

I was stunned. How on earth did acclaimed meditation coach Lynne Goldberg know so perfectly how I was feeling? How I feel so often?

In her meditation session, she explores the roots of our obsession with doing, tracing the origins all the way back to our childhoods when others praised us for doing things that we were good at doing. Art. Dance. Music. Sports. Wordplay.  She continues her exploration–even into relationships–noting that the praise we receive for the things that we do begins to validate us and our self-worth.

And then she drives home her point. Validation through doing is external, controlled by others. It leaves us with the feeling that we have to continue to do–to perform–in order to get those accolades. To feel loved. To maintain that sense of self-worth. Interestingly enough, we’re not even aware that it’s happening.

“At your essence, you are a human being, not a human doing. You are loved and worthy and enough exactly as you are. The only approval that you need is that of your own.”

“Well, of course,” I say to myself. The notion of loving yourself–of approving yourself–goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks even if it did not enter mainstream psyche and pop culture until the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the Hippies of the 1960s.

More, I’m not quite certain that I agree with Goldberg’s tack of tracing our emphasis on doing to the praise that we received from doing things well as long ago as our infancy. It seems to me that we need to consider other possibilities. The joy and love of work. The joy and love of doing. The joy and love of creating. The internal, self-validation that doing things well brings us even when others are totally unaware that we’re doing them.

But I’m not going to quibble over any of those possible disagreements right now.

For now, I’m just glad that I stumbled upon Goldberg’s meditation.

For now, I think that I will revisit King’s recommended reading lists and start to read–or reread–one of the books that I find there.

For now, I think that I will count the raindrops as they fall off the scalloped edges of my Asian patio umbrella.

For now, I think that I will stop the pendulum on my grandfather clock.

For now, I think that I will continue lounging in my azure blue linen bathrobe as noon approaches and as rain continues.

For now, I think that scrambled eggs on toast might be perfect for dinner.

For now, I think that I’m really enjoying doing nothing more than just being.

In Praise of Work

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“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hey, folks. Listen up. We need to do something about the bad rap that work seems to be getting!

Witness what happened to work in 2021: The Great Resignation. The Big Quit. The Great American Walkout.

But even before the Pandemic, job satisfaction wasn’t the greatest.  A comprehensive study conducted jointly by the Lumina Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network, and Gallup found that more than half of U. S. workers are unhappy in their jobs.

That’s unacceptable. That’s downright dreadful, especially since we spend about a third of our life working. It seems to me that what we do for a third of our life ought to make us happy.

As for me, I must be blessed. No, I must be super blessed because I have always loved my work, whatever it happened to be at the time that I happened to be doing the work that I was doing. And believe me: I’ve worked far more than one third of my life.

I’ve worked my entire life. In fact, just the other day, I said to a friend, with no hint of whining, with no intent of complaining, and with no lament of exhaustion: “I was born working.”

Exaggerated? Perhaps. All right. Of course. It is.

Nonetheless, I’m betting that I did something to help my mother speed up my birth so that I could get into the world and begin my world of work. Since she’s no longer alive, she can neither verify nor dispute my claim, so I’m safe with my exaggeration.

Nonetheless, I’m here to give work a better rap. I’m here to sing work’s praises.

Lots of songs focus on work. Who doesn’t know “Heigh Ho” in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Or Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5“? Or how about “Workin’ for a Livin’” by Huey Lewis and the News? Or “She Works Hard for the Money” by Donna Summer? Or “Five O’Clock World” by the Vogues. Or, finally, “Hard Hat and a Hammer” by Alan Jackson.

If those folks can sing about work, why can’t I blog about it? Besides, work is what I’ve always done, and work has always worked for me.

Read on, work with me, and you’ll see for yourself.

I have vivid pre-school memories of scrabbling up and down and all around the slate dump behind our West Virginia home, looking for scrap iron. The “Iron Man” paid a good price for our finds. I say “our” because my brothers and sisters joined in as did most, if not all, of the kids in our coal camp.

After my family moved away to another West Virginia town when I was seven, I discovered that the citizenry there could not only afford bottled soft drinks–Coke, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi–but also could afford to toss the empty bottles thoughtlessly out of their vehicles onto the side of the road. That’s when I discovered that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I collected those bottles, washed them up to their original sparkle, returned them proudly to the local general store, and walked away with three cents per bottle, fully believing that I was fast becoming the richest kid in town.

Around the same time, one of my older brothers found out that folks in our new town loved to fish, especially with night crawlers–large, slimy, segmented worms, with a wide reddish purple band just behind a large head and a body tapering back sometimes as far as 10 inches to a flat tail. Luckily, our yard seemed to be a breeding ground for the anglers’ preferred bait. Weekend nights would find me and my older brother and my older sisters out in the yard with flashlights, searching for nightcrawlers. We became experts in pulling them ever so gently from the ground, ever mindful of increasing our collective earnings by a nickel for each live worm. Before long, we had a nightcrawler monopoly with our local bait shop. We had hit pay dirt, and we knew it.

I branched out to another work endeavor: mowing neighbors’ yards. It didn’t pay much–a quarter a lawn. But it wasn’t as much about growing rich as it was the rich satisfaction that I derived from seeing my beautifully landscaped yards. I remember one in particular. I would spend the entire day cutting the grass, edging around the garden beds and walkways, refreshing the mulch, deadheading and pruning. Sometimes when day was done, I would sprawl out in the grass and play out in my mind the answers that I would give the interviewer who would one day seek me out before featuring my client’s yard in Better Homes and Gardens.

Those work stints joyed me all the up to, through, and out of high school. The summer after graduation, I worked at an explosives company, high up on a mountain, a mile or so from the nearest town. All by myself, I managed an office of one–me. I did it all. Bookkeeping. Typing. Answering the phones. Monitoring the scales and recording weights as trucks went out with explosives and came back empty. In my starched shirt and full Windsor-knot tie, I was the master of all that I surveyed all alone on a mountain top, a mile from nowhere.

When I went to college in the fall, I continued working for the next four years. Work Study. Dorm Counselor. Summer Discovery English tutor. Mail carrier–United States Senate. Intern– former Department of Health, Education and Welfare (Division of the Two-Year College). In all those positions, I enjoyed the work, I enjoyed my colleagues, and I enjoyed the networking.

Work continued through graduate school. Research Assistant for one of the world’s most respected textual bibliographers. Teaching Assistant in one of the country’s best university English departments. Again, the work, those with whom I worked, my students, and my research on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman all brought joy beyond measure. Somes days I pinched myself because it all seemed too good to be true.

We’re nearing the end of my working man’s chronicles, so keep working with me.

After graduate school, I kept right on working. First at the Library of Congress (LOC), where I had a rich, twenty-five-year career. Editor, MARC Project. Editor, National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints. Training Coordinator, United States Copyright Office. Director, Internship Program. Special Assistant, Human Resources. Little wonder that I still consider the LOC to be the best agency in the entire federal sector.

After retiring from the LOC, I became a professor of English at Lord Fairfax Community College (becoming Laurel Ridge Community College). For twenty-three years (teaching twelve months a year, every year), “Professor” has been music to my mountain ears, the completion of a melody that I first started hearing as a coal camp kid. Little wonder that I consider Lord Fairfax/Laurel Ridge Community College and the thousands of students I’ve taught to be the best community college and the best students in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

At the end of this fall semester, I will retire. But guess what? I will keep right on working at something.

Teaching: visiting professor doors may open and I may enter. Research: visiting scholar doors may open and I may enter–my work on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is ongoing. And how about my love of gardening (see my The Joy of Weeding) and my love of baking (see my Oh, No! Sourdough! and Baking Up My Past) and my love of company (see my My Imaginary Guests).

But here’s the bottom line. Whatever work comes my way, I will work to make sure that I’m enjoying the work that I’m doing!

OMG! Do you mean to tell me that you had to work with me all the way through this post just to hear me blurt out that we have to work at enjoying the work that we do. It’s so true that it’s worth repeating. We have to work at enjoying the work that we do.

Maybe–just maybe–the attitude that we bring to our work determines, as much as anything else, the praises that we are able to offer up.