What Do You Do for a Living?

I always lie when someone asks me a question. Not to be rude. It’s because if I don’t want to be a liar, the only answer I can give is I don’t know because I don’t know anything. When I say I don’t know, I am telling the truth. But people hate when you don’t lie to them. 

~

One day in preschool my dad came to pick me up instead of my mom. They asked me if he was my dad, just to be sure. I shrugged because I was taught that lying was bad. He looked identical to my dad, whom I had seen every day, except his hair was slicked back just a little more than usual. Also, I wasn’t sure I had met everyone in my dad’s family. Maybe he had a cousin who had an uncanny resemblance to him, or a twin. Old enough to know twins existed, too young to know for certain if dad had an extra-slick-haired twin no one spoke of.

They made my dad sit in his car for an hour while my mom finished her shift at Sears and drove across town. 

“Why didn’t you just tell them?”

“I didn’t know if he was daddy,” I said over spaghetti that evening.

“But you know now, right?”

“No.”

She cried. 

My dad dropped his fork on his plate, wrapped his arm around her, shaking his head.

Ohhh I see. It’s better to lie.

~

When I was in high school, I knew I couldn’t explain why I needed to take the cowboy boots out of Josh Ament’s locker, put them on in between class periods, and gallop through the hallway screaming, Yeehaw! The only reason: I don’t know. 

“Uh, I thought it would be funny.” I didn’t care if it was funny. I just needed to do it. I was on the way to Algebra 2. We were about to take a test on integers or something. I also had a big cross-country meet that afternoon. I saw the cowboy boots. People everywhere. Sarah Wiles. Test seconds away. Sarah. I put them on. I danced. They laughed. Sarah laughed. Teachers scowled. I felt fine, but not because they laughed. Or because teachers scowled. Those are just things that happened. 

~

“What do you do for a living?” men are always asking me.

I don’t know is obviously the only true answer to that question. The question doesn’t make sense. 

First: What does a living mean? Does it mean surviving? If so, I don’t know the answer to that question, because I have been alive regardless of what I have or haven’t done. I will only know the answer right at that moment when death becomes immediately imminent. Like, if I’m walking down a street and then there’s suddenly a bus millimeters from my face going sixty, I will know: I avoid getting hit by buses for a living. 

But they might be asking how I make money to live. Again, I don’t know. My wife set up our account because she works. 

So, when they ask me, I lie: I go to work. 

“What line of work?” 

The truth is that every day I go to an office and there is a stack of papers on my desk, a computer, and a camera pointed at me with a red light that’s always on. A bald guy with a tie always comes over to make sure I’m always entering the numbers from the papers into the spreadsheet on the computer. 

But I’m not convinced that is “work.”  I don’t do it with money in mind. I don’t even know if he pays me. Every day I show up and enter numbers until he says I can leave. Is that work? It doesn’t feel hard. Or easy. It’s like floating. Lying back in a self-driving car and turning the wheel even though you don’t need to.

~

After my kids’ pet fish died, they asked me if it went to heaven. I lied. They ask me before bed if there are monsters. I lie. When they ask if the world will be okay or if it will soon be consumed by a nuclear apocalypse, I lie.

I hate lying to my kids.