Guilty Pleasure

This is a sketch I made from a balcony in Barcelona where I spent a few crippled days with  bandaged feet.  I drew it after walking half of the Camino de Compostela in 2003.  It reminds me that some people don't have to walk 15 or 20 miles a day to have fun.  One of my childhood friends is retiring from Worcester Public Schools in May...I'm jealous. I take fun very seriously and I seem to need projects, such as walking across the top of Spain for a month, to have a good time.  So maybe it's just as well that I continue to work.  I'm at work now, as a matter of fact, working my "duty day", which entails a satisfying 14 hour day at school.  Too bad there's nobody home, except those other teachers, to guilt trip.  I'm manning the library after a day of teaching indirect objects, the Latin root MOV, schwa unaccented syllables, and research papers. I'm a saint. 

I grew up in a workaholic family.  Dad ran the family book bindery where even the most addled or underaged family members could perform some task.  I was in there cleaning the bathrooms at 11.  There was always an angry sign in the women's room demanding that Kotex should be disposed of in the basket, and if that wasn't enough to convince any woman to conform, the glares of the men after reaming out the toilet was enough.  A few years later, I was trained up for most of the jobs that didn't involve guillotines or pressurized machines that could flatten your arm for good.  Every dime I made went into my college education. I worked in the Dura Book Bindery in Marlboro, MA from the ages of 11 to 21, when I was finally released from Dad's clutches when I landed a job as a reporter for the "Worcester Telegram and Gazette." All through the book bindery years, I was pressed into service in my "spare" time, after school and bindery,  to help Dad plow, cultivate, harvest, or sell in his market garden.  When we did take a day off once every five years to attend a family reunion, my mother and I could be seen hidden away in the kitchen, vigorously wiping plates with a clean cloth, or degreasing pots.  This was strategic--we looked like angels, the big helpers, when it was really about avoiding anything social.  Social  fun was tough for the Kimballs, but work was easy. 

The habit of using my work as a hiding place has been successful until now, but as my peers retire, I'm going to have to figure out a different approach, if I ever get to retirement myself.  How can I continue to be virtuous and without reproach?  I've certainly enjoyed laying a guilt trip on others, such as the last man with whom I lived.  He was older, and he had early retirement, so I would come dragging home from work and ask in a slightly haughty voice what he'd done with himself all day.  Worked like a charm!  He'd get all weird, blustering, and rapidly point out all of his projects while I'd cackle in the corner.  I don't want anybody doing that to me,  unless I can figure out a way not to care anymore.