BY: BRIAN DOYLE
Many years ago I was a newspaper delivery boy in our small town — five afternoons and two early mornings a week, every day of the year but Christmas, on my bicycle, with a cavernous canvas bag hanging from the handlebars; a bag of such admirable strength and endurance, no matter how many thousands of papers were crammed into it, and rain and snow and mud and launderings inflicted upon it, and gimlet-eyed dogs fended off with it, that I wish I still owned it today, just to be able to pull it out of a drawer occasionally to contemplate its bruised and sinewy dignity and grace.
I collected more stories along my route than there were addresses to reach, for even then, as the son of gifted raconteurs, I was eager to hear tales and details, hints and intimations, chapter and verse, and then happily try to imagine the backstories, as I rode home through the dusk, skiffling the oak leaves, wary of cars and owls. And here and there I have written some of those stories, for it seemed to me that there were amazing tales on every street — the family with thirteen pale gaunt children who never spoke, but sat silently on their immense porch as I opened their mailbox; the old man who paid me in nuts and berries and vegetables, and never once did we discuss the unusual coin of transaction, though I had to cover his bill myself from my small profits; the seemingly rich man who never paid me at all in the years I delivered his paper, though he often promised to next week at the latest, and drove the brightest shining cars in town.
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