I’ve become an early riser — 5 am every morning. This started a week ago today, and I’ve managed it every day except Saturday which I think is a reasonable exception. It works for me because I get a couple hours of quiet time — to read, enjoy my coffee, stretch (because I am old: see below), and even to blog — before the Little Dude is up and demanding my constant attention. Something about this morning, in particular, reminds me of my paper route.
I used to deliver the Edmonton Sun. This started in 1993, the summer before grade nine, and I only quit when I went on exchange to Germany for three months in the spring of 1996. Almost three years that the papers had to be out by 6 am on weekdays, but I got an hour to sleep in on Sundays. When I first started, there was no Saturday Sun, so that was my night to stay over at friends’, but after a few months they filled that in. And I always got screwed out of daylight savings: in the spring they’d tell you to set your clock forward before going to sleep, but in the fall you were supposed to finish your route and then move the clock back.
Every so often, I’d wake up in a panic thinking I’d slept in until 7:30 and ride my bike out to the corner and find my papers hadn’t been dropped off. So I’d whip back home to call the office and find out if there had been a problem at the presses and the papers were late (as sometimes happened), only to see — now that I had my glasses on — the time was actually 1:30.
But when all went as planned, I’d stumble upstairs around 5:00 where my dad was up and reading the Journal which, as a serious paper, was delivered earlier than the Sun. Then grab my coat and bag, out the door, fetch my bike from behind the garage, and head out to the corner three blocks away where a pile or two of papers were sitting on the sidewalk for me.
The five a.m. air is always cold enough to wake you up, no matter how tired you are; that and the quiet are the best parts of this time of day. But there’s cold enough and then there’s cold — and most winters days by the time I got home my ski mask was frozen solid from 13-year-old-boy-unbrushed-teeth breath. The worst was snow, because by 5 a.m. not even the retired old men have been out to shovel their sidewalks, and there’s been no traffic to pack down tracks on the street that a kid can ride his bike in. Days after a heavy snow, the route took twice as long, I fell two or three times on every block, didn’t get finished until it was almost light out, and barely had time to shower and get to school on time.
Anyway, that was my first job and until Hosanna, it was the job I’d held the longest. As much responsibility and work ethic as I have now — and I am a lazy man — I suppose I earned it out in the cold before dawn. Who knows what the future will bring, but it doesn’t look good for newspapers or paper boys. Will they still print the news on paper in 2020, when the Little Dude is a bigger, more awkward and gangly dude? Maybe not, and there’s no sense being too wistful about that — he’ll come to learn about work somehow.
Unless our robot overlords no longer have use for us.
