The Boy of Paper.

Do any actual boys deliver actual newspapers anymore?

Never mind the fact that hardly anyone seems to get the paper anymore. Neither do I. When we first fled the city and moved here to fabulous Hudson Valley suburbia, I insisted on subscribing. I wanted to get to know the place. I figured reading the paper on my way to work would give me a feel, some "local color" as it were. And to an extent it helped. Eventually I got annoyed with their slanted coverage and sometimes amateurish reporting, so I dropped it.

Plus, I never got the box.

I guess the promotion had ended a while before I arrived. It seemed like at one time, every new subscriber would get a box he could attach to the mailbox post, a box in which his newspaper would be placed, as gently as one would a newborn babe, every morning.

Guess the age of that promotion.

In all the years here, I do not think I have seen a newspaper delivery person use one. They throw the papers out the car windows like they hate them. Most boxes have fallen off the poles, or have been removed by disgruntled homeowners.

And they are adult delivery persons, not paperboys or papergirls. Or newspaper has been delivered by an array of grown-ups who are willing to get up very early and drive around in their own (often elderly and infirm) automobiles to deliver the news, God bless them. There's a lot of turnover in the business. Are any newspapers delivered by kids anymore?

I think it's great when teenagers have jobs -- they learn a lot about responsibility, duty, and if the job has a legit payroll, how the government screws over a paycheck. These are important lessons. But I must confess my jobs before college were never on the books, and usually involved shoveling or hauling or mowing.

The one time I delivered newspapers, I was filling in for a friend while the family was on vacation. It was easy, but it didn't seem that way at the time. It was in one of the Outer Boroughs, not Manhattan, but it was a route that covered a couple of apartment buildings -- very little walking, no exposure to rain or that hot summer sun. I think the thing that made it hard, or that I used to make it hard on myself, was terror of screwing up. I knew that if I didn't deliver to the right apartments that my friend would get heat for it, and I didn't want to let him down. I also hated the idea of an adult being mad at me. But I managed to get through the week without incident.

It did not, however, make me want to run out and get a route of my own. Most of the paper deliveries I did after that were courtesy of Atari.