CHAPTER XIV
OVERTIME
To play is for a man to do what he pleases or to do nothing—to go about soothing his particular fancies
Charles Lamb: “Letter to Bernard Barton.”
That idea of soothing your particular fancy gives to me the very clearest image of play and playtime. And most men’s fancies take a deal of soothing, since man will fancy himself and his capabilities to be x, when his nearest and dearest could tell him, if they were not his nearest and dearest, that they are not even y, but something far nearer to a b c.
And as long as a man does not fancy himself at his real work, but only in playtime, what does it matter? For in a sane man it seems a natural attribute that he should dislike work he is peculiarly fitted for, and should hanker after jobs that he is naturally ill-equipped to perform. I always looked forward to what I called “overtime,” when I could get away from briefs and law books, and put in a few solid hours spoiling beautiful hand-made paper with inharmonious water-colours, or writing plays and stories that nobody wanted to publish. Why I should have called it “overtime” I do not know, for real overtime is paid at least at the rate of “time
and a quarter,” but my overtime generally cost me money. Perhaps the idea I have in calling it “overtime” is that these tasks could only be done after the day’s work was over, which is the only attribute my “overtime” had in common with the overtime of the working man.
From my earliest days—when to the dread and horror of my family I bought a fiddle and tried to learn to play it—I have experienced a sane and healthy desire to spend my working hours on jobs I know I can never do, rather than in exercising capacities which have always been with me. I call it a sane and healthy tendency, because I find it to exist in nearly everyone who feels physically and mentally well.
I once knew a plus 2 golfer who spent all his overtime away from the links in trying to grow tomatoes out of doors. Each season the climate—which he spoke of as a horticultural bogey—was at least 7 up on him before the first frost came and stopped the round. But he had many merry hours in his garden, and laughed gaily when he topped a budding plant with a careless approach with a hoe or was badly bunkered by a patent manure. What really bored him was the monotony of golf with eighteen perfect drives every round he played. It was only on those rare occasions when he pulled or sliced into the rough that I have known him to smile and openly admit “that there was some fun in the old game, after all.”
I early discovered the delights of “overtime” in