So who’s working this weekend?

Labor Day is a weird holiday.

Here we are, taking a day off to celebrate all the days in the year we can’t take off. Right here at the end of summer, on top of it.  

I mean, when it comes to seasons,  summer is the year’s weekend, and here we top it off with a holiday celebrating going back to work -- just before we do go back to work.

And, of course, going back to work is something many of us will spend a fair amount of Monday complaining about.

No irony lost there…

But come Tuesday, back to work we go. The fortunate among us anyway.

For better than a year and a half I’ve been officially designated a contemporary gentleman of leisure … retired, that is. No longer bound to desk, supervisor and timeclock. Free to do as I choose … and what do I choose?

With some chagrin I admit it … work.

If I didn’t, I guess there’d be a blank spot here in the paper and you’d have a few more minutes in your day to kill.

Truth be told, aside from sex and supper, work – creative, meaningful, engaging work – is the best part of most any day. On top of that, looking back at a good day’s work well done gives a particularly sweet savor to kickin’ back and doin’ nothing.

But that’s not really what Labor Day is all about, ‘cuz most of us, when we talk about going back to work, well, we’re really talking about going back to the job.

And boy, is there a difference.

If we’re lucky, our jobs involve a significant amount of good and meaningful work, but all but inevitably, there’s a whole lot of crap that goes along with it – nit-picky supervisors, psychotic clients, co-workers who leave stinky cheese in the break room fridge. It’s the job, not the work, we’re wont to complain about – the tedious, limiting, uninspired day-after-day reason we call the hour after quitting-time “happy.”

Still, the Tuesday after Labor Day, there we’ll be, a little hung over maybe, but there we’ll be.

It may be a bad job, but somebody’s got to do it.

There’s no way around it. Somebody has to clean out the septic tank, pick up the road kill, supervise the kiddie ball-pit at the fast-food burger joint. High paid motivational speakers and high school guidance counselors might tell folks to go out and pursue their passion, but not too many of the folks gutting hogs and beheading chickens would use the word “passion” to describe what they do for eight hours every day.

But without ‘em, we’d be doing without pork chops and KFC.

The truth is, the gal stocking shelves at Walmart is more important to our day-to-day than the Wall Street suit-and-tie peddling discount derivatives to fools with more money than they have the good sense to know how to spend. So why do we begrudge the one a paycheck big enough to cover clothes, rent and groceries with a trip to the doctor when the kid gets sick?

And why are we surprised and self-righteously put out when, after month after month when the ends won’t meet, she marches into the boss’s office to sing him a chorus of “Take this job and shove it,”

The real surprise is that it doesn’t happen earlier and more often.

And all of us who depend on the labor of folks whose good, hard work won’t earn them a halfway decent living owe them all a real, deep debt of gratitude … along with a whole lot of back pay and benefits.

We might want to take a bit of time this Labor Day to ponder that.