Paperboy of the Year

LAP here. I’m a frequent commenter but rare blogger. This was always MEP’s brainchild, and I selfishly enjoy reading her posts much more than creating my own so I’ve been dormant for well over a year. However, since she is still basking in the glow (a.k.a learning to manage the chaos) of motherhood times three, I offered to help a sister out.

Sometime last year, MEP gave my dad a copy of What a Paperboy Learned about Business by Jeffrey J. Fox. He enjoyed the book, especially because he’d had many of the same experiences during his five years as a paperboy. I think he could still go through, house by house, reciting the names of the neighbors on his route. On his bike every afternoon, he’d deliver the papers regardless of what weather the Midwest was serving up that day. To his best recollection, there were only two times during his tenure that his mother took pity on him and drove him around. (Hard for me to believe that my soft spoken, ever shrinking grandma could have towed such a hard line.) His work ethic apparently did not go unnoticed as he twice earned the honor of Paperboy of the Year, NTB. He maintains he learned a lot about everything from self-discipline to the art of selling from his delivery days.

Well, it’s not 1960 anymore. I have a feeling that if Jeffrey Fox or my dad lived in my neighborhood, they would cringe to see the paperboy in action. I know I do. Our afternoon paper is just a once a week community press. It is lightweight in stature and content. However, it comes to each resident once a week for the steep cost of $2.50 per month. I enjoy it to the extent that it gives progress updates on construction and new businesses in the area. If I am being honest, I also find it endlessly humorous that so many people participate in the “take the community press paper with you on vacation, take a picture of your group holding it, and send it to us for guaranteed publication” feature.

The paperboy for this ever important publication is my eighth grade neighbor. Each Wednesday, his mom drives him around in her Sienna while he tosses papers to the fifty houses in our quiet, suburban, three cul de sac’d neighborhood. And so I ask….what is the point? Is this the way his mom makes him “earn” money? Is this to pad a future resume? Is the community press really hard up to find a willing carrier? Maybe the time in the van is the source of family bonding? I’m trying not to judge; I really do just wonder.

I don’t know why it bothers me at all, but it does. Maybe it goes against my sense of right and wrong, like somehow he is cheating. On a beautiful sunny day, why can’t this athletic young kid ride his bike around (come to think of it, not sure I’ve ever even seen him on a bike?) and actually talk to a neighbor or two? Am I making too much of this? Maybe I am still bitter from this weekend when he came to collect* and rang the doorbell, instantly waking my one year old. Did I mention that his dad was sitting in his van out front, following him around the neighborhood and giving him the occasional lift from house to house as he collected? I know it’s not 1960, but I guess I just hate to think this is the new standard for paperboys. What do you think...am I being too dramatic?


*Once a month, he puts an envelope in our paper which we are to leave on our front door by noon on Sunday so that he can collect. Not a bad system, but I failed to have ours out at that time which is why we had any interaction at all that day.

MEP wants to know if any of her other readers are interested in doing a guest post. If so, send her an email at mep@nottobrag.net. She’d be thrilled!