Paperboy

While mowing lawns and doing other chores for hire was a good source of income for me in my tween years, I also had the stereotypical suburban kid’s career of paperboy for a number of years.

Incidentally, the “boy” part of the word paperboy seemed weird even when I was very young, especially since the person who taught me the ropes was herself very much not a boy. I noticed with some degree of awe that Carrie would walk around the neighborhood, delivering a local newspaper—one of those weekly regional papers that relied heavily on local ads and whose journalistic department wasn’t likely to win a Pulitzer any time soon.

Carrie taught me not only how to deliver the papers throughout the neighborhood (they went on the edge of the porch, never into the mailbox) in a thoughtful manner, street by street so the route was efficient; she also taught me how to walk up to houses, one at a time, and ask for money.

That’s right—we were paid a pittance from the newspaper for doing all that labor on …