In the afternoons, I have been leaving my online work for a second job. This supplemental employment is a change from typing up documents at a keyboard, and that’s what I needed after fourteen years. In this job, I drive a half-hour into town. I wear a small apron around my waist, with pockets that hold small toys, containers of crackers and sweets, and my phone, which comes in handy in this line of work. After an active several hours of leading a small person about by the hand, I go home with snatches of nursery songs in my head and put off the required quarter-hour of note-taking until late in the evening. Now and then I think, “I’m sure glad it worked out this way.”

It started a year ago; the need to earn a few hundred bucks extra per month and get away from the glowing screen for a few hours a day. It just did not seem healthy to spend my life in a chair, straining my eyes mercilessly, reading and writing, and fighting distraction. Substitute teaching, which had been the attempted supplement for the past decade, was just not cutting it. While often satisfying, including riffs of real teaching and enjoyable relationships with colleagues, substituting not only did not pay enough for the required outpouring of energy and time; it also sapped the resources I needed for my online job. It was time to look for a regular source of income, but I couldn’t see myself at a grocery store or working retail. I answered ads for tutors of young kids; these seemed hopeful, and then fizzled to nothing after promising phone interviews and even a meeting with a family. My photographer sister sympathized, all too familiar with the phenomenon. It’s called “ghosting.”