part-time all the time

I suppose that I could have gotten a full-time job somewhere. I could leave my house at 7:30 and get to work by 8. Stay there until 5 and wear black slacks with button-ups and sweaters. I could have a little cubicle, maybe eventually an office, and work at my computer and talk to "clients" and write memos.

However, as I have never been one to stay indoors and as I couldn't think of a job where I would stay sane inside of an office all day, I have chosen (or been dumped into) a life of part-time jobs.

I work half time as the Youth Director at Hope Church in Winston-Salem. This means that I pick up high school kids from school and take them to Starbucks and the grocery store. I meet with them for Bible study on Wednesdays and teach Sunday school and plan things like lunches and days on orchards to pick apples. 

I try to write for ten hours a week, working on my book. I never achieve ten hours because I don't have the discipline and life happens and it's the first thing I let fly, though writing my novel is my greatest hope and passion. Funny how we let things like that happen--let our passions linger on the sidewalk waiting for us while we keep holding up one finger, saying "one second!" with a look of apology on our faces.

Leading Young Life at Forsyth Country Day School is a volunteer thing, but ends up being another job which I love. Mark and I just got to spend three days at Windy Gap with 56 high school kids from our school and it was incredible.  The other leaders in our area are some of the coolest people I've ever been friends with and I find myself doing work at the YL Office more often than anywhere else.  Today, in fact, as I sat in the corner of Lauren's office, Murf (the area director) came in and, not seeing me, turned off the light. I realized that if I spoke I'd scare him half to death. So I spoke. And watched him teeter as a falling tree when the ax's final blow has severed the trunk. I actually thought he might crumble. We laughed and he apologized desperately for having used the bathroom just beside Lauren's office. "I don't use that bathroom when the girls are here!" he exclaimed. "I am so sorry you had to hear that." Life is a comedy.

My other job, working at the front desk at a local bone and joint doctor's office, is another ten hours a week. Mark calls it my "fun" job, mostly because he knows I spend the whole morning laughing. I work beside Natalie. She's a good girl, born and raised around here in Walnut Cove.  She's married to Russell, has two daughters in high school and college and has worked at the office for over 15 years.  She knows everyone. Somehow every person that migrates through our office has some kind of connection to Natalie or one of her four sisters or her mother. She's always telling me, "Ginny, it's a bad scene." On bad days, when seventy-year-old women wave their umbrellas wildly, refusing to pay their twenty dollar copay, she purses her lips and, in her southern tongue, orders me to follow her to "the closet" (the supply walk-in closet).  Her eyes widen and, breathing fire, she'll call a spade a spade, use choice words to describe the man who demanded a second set of x-rays and the woman who picked twenty-two pieces of candy out of the candy bowl when she herself wasn't even being seen--her son was. Her son is forty.  "It's pitiful," Natalie says. And all I can do is laugh.