Closing Time at the Ben Franklin Store

Daily writing prompt

In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled?

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At closing time, we put drop cloths over all the counters so as to prevent dust accumulation, emptied the registers and left the cash drawers open, and rolled up the awning. If it was a Saturday, my father and I would have worked a 12-hour day. We locked the doors at nine, drove home from Dearborn to Southfield, got home about 9:45 and ate dinner on TV tables in the living room while we watched Gunsmoke.

I remember as a teenager knowing what it felt like to be “dead on my feet.”

But I also remember how deeply grand it was to get home, change into my pajamas and eat dinner at ten o’clock. Like I had truly earned my bean soup or my hamburger in mushroom gravy or whatever it was. That’s not fulfillment, it’s something else. Reward. Like the reward for working hard is to not work.

It’s in that moment of not working that working hard is its most righteous. I love working hard because I love that moment of not working. It’s luscious. Unapologetic. Earned. But then that becomes addictive, especially if one has lived their entire lives in a work hard to not work hard cycle. Comes retirement and the expectation is that we just don’t work hard anymore, that we just watch Gunsmoke all the time but maybe have better dinners, things that take all afternoon and many trips to the spice store to make.

My kids grew up working hard. I think because it is what I knew. Looking back, I wonder if my admonitions to get a job had to do with their development as people or with my deep love of that Gunsmoke moment, the tremendous relief and satisfaction of having worked hard and then not working. They would look at me now and say, ‘Well, Mom, everyone feels that way at the end of the day.’ And they probably do. I just tend to think everything I’ve done has been special in some unique and notable way. It probably has to do with writing prompts.