March 20, 1986

The wind ripped a page from the calendar this week, revealing March.  It stripped dirt from fields and used it to soil the sky.  The wearing of hats or skirts demanded constant attention.

After slapping you about, like a barn cat toying with a doomed mouse, the wind filled your mouth with grit and sent you on your way feeling abused.  March is like that - a bully of a month we must suffer to reach April.  (April may well be the cruelest time, but March is doubtless the most pug-ugly.)

Watching the wind carrying topsoil away Monday afternoon conjured an image which had been pushed to memory's back attic.  It was a March afternoon in 1963.  Those were relatively tranquil days - no one had heard of Lee Harvey Oswald, Viet Nam was a distant country of minor concern, the Everly Brothers were as wild as musicians got.

A young boy walks in a line with his classmates from the school room to the front gate.  It is 3:15, the end of another day of organized education.  Just before reaching the front gate the boy breaks from the line to pull his bicycle from the rack - a 26 incher, red with white stripes, the chain guard and front fender are loose, wrapped around the box handlebars are canvas carrying bags.  The boy, in true Horatio Alger fashion, has started down the road toward financial success as a paperboy.

He bids his fellows good-bye until the morrow and pedals west, through a neighborhood of prim, brick houses.  The sun is warm, but a stiff westerly breeze makes pedaling difficult.  He stands on the pedals, forcing them down, leaning, face down, into the wind.

The life of a paperboy has its advantages.  Primary among them is having change that jingles in jean pockets.  A boy must have the means to buy baseball cards, and a paper route provides it. Ambitious lads could pay their weekly paper bills and still have ten to twelve bucks left over. This particular lad, lacking somewhat in ambition, was content to end the week with six to eight bucks.

Of almost equal importance to the monetary rewards were the social benefits - paperboys always had an excuse for ringing the doorbell of the class sweetheart.  (Ding dong.  "Would you like to order the paper?  Oh, hi, Patti, I didn't know you lived here.")

But there were also three curses which came with the canvas carrying bags and the boxes of rubber bands and the collection tickets - snarling dogs, Sunday mornings, and the wind.  Each was abhorrent.

Eventually, a paperboy got to know the dogs on his route; which ones could be blustered into submission, which ones had barks and no bites, which ones had bites and no barks.  Routes could be adjusted to avoid the worst of the measly curs.  Due to the repetition of the route - papers were delivered every day, rain or shine - truces between boy and canine were finally drawn.

Sunday mornings were something else again.  Although every other day of the week the papers were delivered in the afternoon, on Sunday they were delivered early; before the sun came up, before anyone with any sense was out on the street.  Some paperboys got a thrill out of clambering out of bed at 4 a.m. to pedal down dark sidewalks, breaking the silence of the night by plopping a thick paper down on cool concrete.

This particular paperboy, pedaling now against the March breeze, never got a thrill out of setting an alarm on Saturday night and having it rattle him from his sleep while the moon was still high.  In fact, he learned to despise Saturday nights, Sunday mornings and the relentless tick, tick, tick of that clock.

But he was not thinking of Sunday morning this afternoon.  Rather he was thinking about the wind - the final paperboy curse.  The canvas bags caught the wind, making progress even more strenuous.  But finally he reached the station, loaded his bags with 47 papers, and rode slowly off toward his first delivery.

He never reached it.  The wind was too strong.  His legs were too weak.  There was too much gravel in the gutter.  The excuses were endless; excuses which would never have escaped the lips of Horatio Alger.

The paperboy fell with his bike, the newspapers spilling out onto the street.  The wind wasted no time ripping them apart and blowing them in pieces down the sidewalk, through the yards, and on, forever.  He sat there, bruised in the gutter, and watched them dance away.

March is the bully we must suffer to reach April....  ~ T. Stucky