It's My Job

(Scallop boat heading out of New Bedford, MA)

Our house in Rhode Island looks out over the waters where Buzzards Bay meets Rhode Island Sound. In the summer, a steady stream of boats pass several miles offshore on courses between Newport and Martha's Vineyard, and points in between. In the winter months, boat traffic becomes non-existent but for the commercial scallopers who head to and from their fishing grounds.

Simple observation would have me describe these distant vessels as black silhouettes on the horizon. At night, their steel hulls are marked by their shipboard lights – red running lights showing when they are headed fifteen or so miles up the coast to the commercial port of New Bedford, green when they are steaming offshore for George's Bank.

While two craft of the commercial fleet head to sea for commerce on this January day, I am sitting comfortably at my keyboard punching out words for Write On The Water. Although I strive to incorporate authenticity in my writing, I have no special knowledge of what it means to work at sea under these winter conditions. Like most others, I will leave it to my imagination to account for the experience of slipping on the icy deck of a yawing ship as the fully loaded dredge works it way up from the bottom. In some ways, these thoughts leave me, an author who uses the ocean as a backdrop, feeling as an impostor.

Perhaps, though, the work of a writer is different. Several decades ago, Mac McAnally incorporated the line "Now I've been lazy most all my life writin' songs and sleepin' late" into his song "It's My Job." I have no idea how hard Mac does or doesn't work, but I know that McAnally is still singing, still performing, and still writing great songs.

I have deep respect for those who take to the sea despite the season. And I've worked too many long hours in my day job and I've spent too many nights sanding and varnishing in my hobby job to accept any suggestion of laziness. Yet, as far as this writing thing, maybe I do need to accept that the apparent idleness is actually part of the work required of an author. Perhaps this time watching the boats head to sea is simply confirmation that It's My Job.

And as far as the question of Mac McAnally being lazy? Here's a sample of one of his newer songs that illustrates that he's working his own job just right:

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