I’m getting old.

I suspect as much because any time I hear somebody talking about an extended period of unemployment, I launch into The Speech.

You know the one. It’s some variation of “Why, when I was but 9 years old, I was working. Getting up before the birds and delivering newspapers all over the city. The bags were 200 pounds apiece, but I managed. I got those papers delivered and do you want to know why? Because that was my job.”

Which is only half malarkey. I had a paper route, all right, but I was lousy at it. I could set 15 alarm clocks and string buckets of water over my bed. Didn’t matter. I liked to sleep and in those hours around dawn, I was greedy about it. Most mornings, I came to just before noon and found that guilty stack of papers out next to the doorstep. I’d feel terrible. As soon as I watched an hour of cartoons, rode my Huffy a little, played some wiffle ball, created something with Lite Brite (outta site! Making things with Lite-Brite!) and dug a hole in the backyard just because, I got my butt moving and delivered those papers.

Because that was my job. In those days, responsibility meant something.

I also bused tables at a truck stop, which is something I wouldn’t recommend to any boy. Not even if your family is starving. Not even if your mother needs an expensive operation to reattach her head. Don’t bus tables at a truck stop. Because burly, John-Deere-cap wearing clodhoppers in plaid will never let you forget that you’re doing woman’s work.

“Boy,” a clodhopper will say. “You’re gonna make somebody a fine wife someday.”

Haw haw haw.

But the point is that I worked every day that I could. Except for those days when there was something good going on in the woods behind the Waterville Armory and I called in sick. Except for the days when I traded shifts with Paul, the truck stop cook who needed the extra pay for some operation that would somehow — I never understood this — add an A to the end of his name. Except for those days when I just didn’t show up because me and the boys were swimming with some girls out at Rices Rips and who could keep track of things like schedules with high times happening?

We weren’t always good workers, but just about everybody I knew had a job. Some of them had more than one, like Randy, who really wanted to buy a motorcycle, or possibly a pinball machine, someday. He worked in the kitchen at Colby College, worked a few shifts at McDonald’s, got work at the armory on bingo nights.

So last week, a trio of cemetery vandals were in court to discuss the matter of restitution. Paying for the damage, that is. And the prospects of the cemetery seeing that $41 grand seems very dim indeed.

One of the culprits has no job. Never had a job. Doesn’t really know what a job is, to tell you the truth. He’s sort of deaf in one ear and never made it past the 10th grade. He gets MaineCare and food stamps. The government pays his rent and his cell phone bill. He’s 19 years old.

The assistant DA says he’s got earning potential.

The other guy is 21. Never went beyond eighth grade. He has no job, either, but collects a monthly government check. He worked on a roof for a week one time, but after that, he and the concept of employment parted ways. He’s got a TV and a Sony PlayStation. The cemetery probably has no use for those, the occupants being otherwise preoccupied with that whole afterlife thing.

So everybody left court reasonably certain that these suspects won’t be paying for the destruction any time soon. Some folks were shocked by this news. I mean, genuinely shocked in a Macaulay Culkin hands-to-the-face kind of way. Never worked? Heavens to Murgatroid.

Which, in my experience, is a bit of an overreaction. I mean, have you been to downtown Lewiston? Down here, the streets are filled with people who make careers out of unemployment. As nimble and sly as any acrobat troupe, they use government programs and welfare loopholes instead of high wires and swings.

I met a young man of perhaps 20 who collected a disability check because of a stutter. It wasn’t a crippling stutter by any means. I didn’t notice it once while we talked. But apparently, somebody somewhere deemed it a handicap of such severity that it rendered the kid completely unable to lift a box, mow a lawn, paint a house, wash a car or carry the two. Forms were filed, papers were signed, and now a check comes every month and the lad has all the time to wander the streets doing pretty much nothing.

Working is learned behavior. You and I had a mom or dad, uncle or older brother telling us to get off our butts right around the time our voices started to change. You either got a job and pulled your own weight or you found yourself penniless, friendless and wearing clothes that didn’t fit you.

These guys, the artful unemployed, grew up in a culture where ambition meant something altogether different. It meant finding a creative way to cash in on government programs designed to help people who want to work but who are unable. It meant getting someone else to pay for the things you need. It’s what they were taught. The working world is foreign to them. They view the rest of us as overachieving weirdos. Some of them view us as suckers.

I know another guy, in his 40s now, who was in a car wreck when he was a kid. Messed up his back real good. Had a few operations, got some cool scars. Back then, a physician told him outright that he qualified for disability. Could have started getting paid that very week. Could have got himself a comfortable couch, put his feet up and let the rest of us do the heavy lifting.

But he didn’t. The dude works 60 hours a week at the very bottom of the crap slide. He bitches about it like the rest of us but just keeps on grinding. I asked him once if he was ever tempted to say the hell with it and get his doctor to sign a note.

“If I didn’t work,” he said, “what would I do with myself?”

Get a PlayStation and stay in shape by overturning headstones once in a while, apparently. Because if you never had a job and never plan to get one, the work of others won’t mean much to you. So, some family used the last of their savings to buy a nice stone for their dear departed papa, who worked 50 years in a mill to support his family. Wouldn’t that stone look just as nice overturned and split in two?

Haw haw haw.

Meanwhile, the rest of us just keep on working. We shingle roofs, catch bad guys, deliver pizza, pound nails and write the news. We pay our bills, buy our own food and shelter and if we have any left over, we shell it out so that our mothers can get operations to have their heads reattached.

Which reminds me that I really need to get around to doing that. A thing like that can only be put off for so long.

Mark LaFlamme is gainfully employed as a Sun Journal staff writer. You can e-mail him at [email protected].