Ah yes. The paperboy days:  my green account book, the papers thrown with a direct hit in the bushes, the ramshackle newspaper office and the smell of cheap cigars, the bark of unappreciative dogs or old men at the door when I collected. This was in the early 60’s in the suburbs of New York: remember the Long Island Press?  Poet Tomas O’Leary remembers delivering papers in Somerville in the 1950’s.

A Paperboy’s Conviction

Globe, Post, Herald, American:
fat Sunday papers out of Boston in the 50’s.
The bundles hit my steps by 5 a.m.

The wooden cart my dad built
bore its stuffing proudly, its iron wheels
wizards of note to my trained ear.

How I loved
the haunting clatter of my cart through
streets magnificently empty! This was Somerville

still abed, dreaming that racket out there
I was happily making. I rarely saw
another soul, or dog or human, as I

made my rounds. But once
as I raced along the sidewalk, there
appeared from exactly nowhere

and precisely in my path
a dog I didn’t know at all. Striving in panic
to avoid it I clipped it slightly

on the butt, sufficient for a yip of
indignation and swift retreat.
Across the street a strident woman

mistook my danced dismay for victory’s glee
and shrilled me into infantile abashment,
my age 13, my guilt full well established.

“You evil child,” she screamed, “how could you do that!”
“No no,” I cried back, “no no no no no!”
“Mean boy,” she shrieked, “you did that, I saw you, bad boy!”

More than half a century later, that woman
rings my memory bell. She cradles
the dog in her floppy arms, the pair of them

so nebulously formed it’s just the memory
I remember: I zigged and zagged
to miss the dog; she was sure I was zeroing in.

Though memory tends to feather the future
with fading wisps of long-untended past,
I know in time’s drone

I once was condemned by a credible witness
I neither begrudge nor forgive,
but merely hope to irritate

with a paperboy’s conviction
as the old girl leaps to make
her judgment calls around the afterlife.

– Tomas O’Leary

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