Paper route
Between 4:00 am and 6:30 am from about 1998 until 2001 I had a morning routine. When I was twelve I became delivery boy for the Brantford Expositor the local newspaper. I was responsible for the delivery of three hundred and twenty papers each morning. The route was too large for me to do on my own and I had to enlist the help of my father. I asked him formally, but since the route was his idea first, I knew he would accept. We would deliver about a hundred and sixty papers each, every morning and would split the earnings down the middle. It was hard to tell who worked for whom.
I would set the alarm, usually at 4:00 am, 3:30 if it was a Friday. I would get up and brush my teeth. Then I would wake my Dad and make go downstairs to make myself Breakfast, usually a glass of milk and two toasts with peanut butter. My Dad would be ready to leave in ten minutes or less. He wouldn't eat anything.
Under complete darkness we drove five minutes to the downtown depot to pick up the papers. Sometimes we waited in the car for the delivery van to show up, while other mornings our pile was waiting for us when we arrived. Fridays, Saturdays, and sometimes Wednesdays we had inserts, advertisements, catalogs, etc. Depending on how cold it was we would usually put the inserts into the papers on the hood of the car. Our family car was a 1980’s Ford Crown Victoria, it had a very large hood. I would stand on the passenger side and fill my bags, and he would fill his on the other. When it was cold I would climb into the back seat to do my half, my dad would do his half on the front seat. On insert days we needed three bags each, one at each side, and one on our backs.
We each had our own side of the street. Sometimes we covered for each other if one of us fell behind. My dad is 6’2” and I was maybe 5’6” then, he walked fast and I had to hustle to keep up, unless he had trouble with a mailbox he usually covered for me. We walked through snowdrifts and rain, sleet. We felt the crisp spring mornings, and the fresh summer dawns. I knew where I was each morning, I knew my task, I knew how to avoid motion lights and whose steps were the slipperiest, I anticipated each crack in the sidewalks.
The route had 4 stages. We did the largest first, carrying the most weight right away. During the spring, by the end of the first stage we would begin to see the morning light peeking up in the East. The end of the first stage was my favorite time each morning, I would run the last three papers to the end of the street and my dad would wait for me at the corner. We would walk back to the car together. We never talked of too much, but we did talk, mostly he drilled me about school and I asked him questions about cars and life, sometimes we complained about the weight of the papers or the weather. Most of the time I was just happy to be outside with him while no one else was awake.
The second stage was a small dead end street. It was also the last street the city would plow during the winter. Which is to say that it never got plowed. There was more than a few mornings when I had to push the car out of a snowdrift. . I had to be careful not to push on the lights or the front grill as I rocked the car back and forth, my dad timed in with the gas peddle. We always got it out.
The seasons then were gradual to me, the light changed slowly, as did the cold. As fall came and winter set in I would need more clothes, then scarves, hats, heavy gloves and then snow pants and long johns. During the winter we did the route entirely in darkness with just the orange phosphorus streetlights casting gloomy shadows on the fresh snow. After the first five houses my scarf would be frozen solid and my dads beard would be white with icicles and frost. The third stage the route wound to the east of the neighborhood and ran beside a large park with. Here the wind whipped across the expanse of soccer fields and built snow drifts in front of peoples front doors and up their steps. Due to the weather making us late at every stage, sometimes my dad would have to leave for work, and I would be left to finish the remainder of the route myself. These mornings I had to carry double which was ok because I had time before school and I could go at my own pace. One blustery morning, more than 12 inches of snow had fallen already, I remember this morning because I remember trudging through the drifts and having the wind coat my front white as I walked. I would step forward and the wind would whip behind me, my tracks were quickly blown over and covered, as if I was never there. The papers just appeared in those mailboxes with no trace of the boy who carried them.
The last part of the route, we would do in the daylight of summer, but in the fall and spring the sun would just be rising and we hurried as not to be seen. We would get back into the car and drive up the hill to the last 6 or 7 houses. My dad would turn off the headlights as we pulled into the driveways. I would run to the mailboxes while he turned around the car. If we were done the third stage early we would walk to these distant houses together carrying only a few papers under our arms. Some Saturdays after the route was finished we would go out for breakfast, just him and I at the local diner.
He would order eggs and chocolate milk. I would get the same.
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