The Paperboy

Every Sunday I make breakfast and set up the breakfast table for Mark. I put his coffee out on the table, serve him something special like pancakes, and always make sure the Sunday paper is right there next to him. The Sunday paper is something that's been in my life forever. There's just something about Sunday papers, I love them. From the time I can remember, I've always looked forward to that paper. As a little kid it was the comics I lusted after. Blondie, Dick Tracy, and Li'l Abner. I loved Li'l Abner, that comic strip was so quirky. As I got older the other sections of the paper became important to me.

I mentioned to Mark how small and thin the Sunday paper has become. Seventy two pages, that's all it was yesterday. That's when I remembered, there is one thing about the Sunday paper I used to hate when I was a kid. Something that made me dread Sundays. I was a paperboy back in the early 1960s. I had a weekday paper route and for a couple of years I also had a weekend paper route. Today's Sunday paper weighs about one ounce. A Sunday paper in 1964 probably weighed near fifty pounds. They were thick, they were large, and I was the guy who delivered them on my bicycle. Okay, maybe they didn't weigh fifty pounds, but I'll bet you they were at least two pounds each. I would have to put a rubber band around each paper, and it hurt like a son of a bitch when one of those rubber bands snapped back on my hand or snapped off into my eye. I would then have to stuff all those papers into the basket on the front of my bike, into the saddlebag baskets at the rear of my bike, and on some Sundays I had to attach my little brother's wagon to the back of the bicycle. Me on my bicycle, in rain and snow, peddling over a hundred pounds of newspapers all around our old neighborhood. Oh, and god forbid if I didn't get the paper on the doorstep. Those people would call and complain, and by the time I got home my parents would have already got the call from the delivery company. I believe I got paid a penny a paper for the thrill of being in the news business.

I don't ever see the person who delivers our paper on Sunday. They come by early and always leave the paper right up against the door. I suspect it's an adult in a car, probably with some kind of newspaper gun shooting newspapers out the car window at my door. I also suspect that they're still only paid a penny per paper.