My pal always scoffed at the notion. “You’ve never done an honest day’s work in your life!” he snorted. Looking back at years of digging ditches, hauling logs and splitting firewood, cutting and burning brush, framing houses and shingling roofs – among other recreations – I begged to differ. But he was never to be diverted from his tougher-than-thou position, so I generally bore its judgment in silence.

Work. The author and broadcaster Studs Terkel did a good-sized book on the subject and by the same name. Almost all of us are engaged in it, retired from it, looking for it, or unable to find any that we can do or that agrees with us.

This year, however, as always in an election year, work has been brought into the public consciousness. Both major political parties claim to be bringing prosperity and justice to the “working men and women of America,” whoever or whatever they may be. Over this past weekend, as my razor-sharp companion Bea and I discussed the topic, I got a little education on the subject.

To me, work has always been what it was to my late friend, a sometime farmer, builder, and logger. There was virtue in very early-morning rising and a pre-dawn breakfast in order to be first in line when the lumber yard opened. A great pile of split firewood at the end of the day was as rewarding as the pay I received at the end of the week. Competition, tacit and otherwise, spiced the labor of lugging shingles or sheets of plywood up a ladder to a roof, carrying heavy loads to remote cabins, and even digging ditches in the pavement of city streets. The result has been a scornful response to politicians’ references to “people’s hard-earned money.” Hard-earned money, it’s always seemed to me, comes from picking cotton (Remember Leadbelly’s song, “Jump Down, Turn Around, Pick a Bale of Cotton”?), chopping sugar cane, cutting and stacking pulp wood, and mixing mortar for several masons. In the good old days in the Adirondacks, at the end of a 45-hour week, I took home $45. That felt well-earned. And it was enough to buy a brand-new Beetle.

As I expounded my hard-earned point of view, my first responder, a graduate school professor, expressed differences of opinion, but so very gently and subtly that it took a few repetitions for it to sink in. Not all hard work or the hard-earned reward for it is strictly physical. Working at a desk, in a cubicle, or in front of a class can be equally demanding, difficult, and (though in a different way) stressful.

I had to admit that she had a point. In fact, it was embarrassing to realize that for a majority of Americans, who work at desks, the jobs can be as hard as those that used to leave me physically depleted at the end of the day. She, for example, routinely puts in weeks that, if measured and paid in hours, would have her on overtime about half the time. Teaching, advising, producing proposals, editing, organizing meetings, and just attending meetings – I’d go mad in just a few weeks. To suggest that she isn’t doing “hard work,” or that her income isn’t hard-earned, would be ludicrous.

On the other hand, not all income is the “hard won dollars” so many of our fellow Americans seem to think they’re making. Just because you don’t like your job and find it hard to face Monday mornings doesn’t make it heroic. A popular internet meme is a photo of a hay bale with the caption, “If you haven’t spent days in the hot sun pitching these, you don’t know what hard work is.” I submit that a lawyer, cracking the books into the wee hours for a court appearance the next morning, is working just as hard as anyone in the hayfields. Each of us, working in his little sphere, whatever it may be, is enjoying something many people in many places, can’t, for many different reasons, even aspire to: a job. I can’t say I’ve enjoyed every one I’ve had, but they all together led invariably to something better. Now, nearing the end of 75 years of employment so far, I’m enjoying the combined fruits of them all.