Nobody just loafs anymore

I’m actually loafing a lot and enjoying it,” former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn told fellow Oklahoma Republicans when he visited them in the Oklahoma Legislature in February 2015 to urge them to join the list of states calling for a convention to amend the U.S. Constitution.

“Hmmph,” I snorted. Surely he doesn’t consider visiting the Oklahoma Republican legislators loafing. Not when the legislators had been so not loafing while introducing, as of May 3, that same year, 2,015 bills, many of which were bound to become new laws. So probably he meant loafing back home in Muskogee.

But what really got my attention in Coburn’s comment was the word “loafing.” It’s not a word we hear very often anymore. People don’t loaf anymore. They work, they play, they e-mail, text, twitter, tweet and more. …

Loaf is defined as “to pass time at leisure; idle.” Do we ever see anyone just doing absolutely nothing? No, we do not. We are staring at our cell phone, Ipad, Kindle — any device to avoid even one minute of inaction — of loafing.

I can remember when, in the olden days, people loafed. It was a perfectly acceptable activity. “What’cha doin’?” we asked one another in slower-paced days — before the term “social media” was even in our vocabularies.

“Oh, just loafin’ around,” would be the pleasant and completely honorable answer.

Men, perhaps, were bigger loafers than women back then because, as we knew from both experience and observation, women’s work was never done. By the time women cooked the meals, did all the housework, washed, ironed, canned food, tended the garden, they had precious little time left. If they found themselves with a few minutes in a rocking chair, more than likely they’d be shelling peas or sewing on a button.

Men might work long hours at their job or in the field but after work or, for farmers, when it rained or a piece of machinery broke down, or the planting or harvest was done, you could find them loafing around a local hangout, a café or a drug store or, in our little town, at one of the two garages. They’d squat on their haunches, smoking or chewing tobacco, swapping stories and laughing a lot. It was sort of a rural therapy group.

Sometimes it was OK for kids to loaf.

“What are you doing now?” a parent might ask an idle child.

“Nothin’.”

“Oh. All right.”

Sometimes it wasn’t.

Whatcha’ doin?”

“Nothin’.”

“Well, grab that hoe and chop the weeds out of the watermelon patch.”

However, loafing and being called a loafer were two separate definitions. Loafing was temporary — a respectable respite from work. A loafer was somebody habitually idle — and an object of community scorn.

When my daddy needed someone to help him work on his telephone lines after a bad storm and the lines were broken and down in a ditch, he’d drive to the loafer’s hangout and pick up somebody willing to work a day or two.

Sen. Coburn might have enjoyed a little loafing but he was not a loafer. Especially not when he was working for a constitutional convention. (He died in 2020 at the age of 72.)

For those of us who are always gasping, like the White Rabbit, “Oh dear, oh dear, I shall be too late,” a little loafing would be good.

Mary McClure lives in Lawton and writes a weekly column for The Lawton Constitution.