Song About Old Rollercoaster

My Life as a Paperboy

markrichardson:

Today I was walking my dog Stanley and I heard a mourning dove. It’s a very familiar sound from my childhood. 

Between the ages of 11 and 13, I delivered the Lansing State Journal in my neighborhood. In those days paper carriers were contractors and ran their own business. You had to buy the papers from the State Journal, and then you had to collect from the customers. If your collections were bad you could actually lose money. I opened my first checking account at this age so I could use it for buying papers for my route.

As a kid I thought they birds were called “morning doves” because I always heard their call in the morning. Often when I would be delivering papers, it would be right around dawn and I would be the only person on the streets, everything was dead quiet but I could hear the birds and that lonely sound. The sound suggests “An empty street at dawn” to me, and even now whenever I hear it, it takes me back to that place. I think of a bag of papers on my back and the sun is just coming up and I feel like the only person in the world. 

I would usually walk on my route or ride my bike, but on Sundays, and some holidays, like New Year’s Day, the papers would be too thick and heavy for me to carry, so my mother or father would drive me. They would insist on getting up extra early to drive to Dunkin’ Donuts to get coffee and donuts to drink and eat while i did my deliveries. If it was New Year’s Day, they might be hungover. 

In the winter in Michigan, it would be impossibly cold, and I can remember mornings where my face would feel like it was cracking it and it was dark and the world seemed like it was covered in ice. And I’d grab a stack of papers from the car and go down a street and back and then I’d return to see my father sitting in the front seat, the dome light of the car on, coffee in his hand, donut on the seat, and he would be reading the sports section carefully so that he could re-assemble the paper for my last customer. The heat would be blasting in the car and I’d warm up for a second and I was thinking I’d do anything just to be able to stay in there and go to sleep. But instead I grabbed a stack for the next street and stepped back out into the black and freezing morning. 

(via markrichardson)

• 29 May 2016
• 19