Did you ever have a paper route?

Did I ever have a paper route? Who comes up with these things? How many children actually have paper routes anymore? Isn’t like more Leave it to Beaver stuff?

I never had a paper route. But once again, I can figure out a way to provide a more thorough answer without having the experience, because although I never had a paper route, I have delivered papers.

This happened when I was working at the Tuttle Times. I was there for almost 10 years, and I was a writer, photographer, layout person, etc. Even sold a few ads once or twice. Jack-of-all-trades, if you will.

One thing I did not do was deliver papers.

But one day, there was a terrible storm coming. Big snowstorm sleety mess. I was innocently finishing up the newspaper at the Chickasha office, getting it ready to print. Lenora was over at the Epworth Christian Dayschool, where she went for the one day a week I was in Chickasha. She was little then…two years old or less, anyway.

After I got done with the newspapers, they would go through the big printing press. I liked to stick around until they printed, so I could see how it looked before I went home. Sometimes I didn’t wait, and just saw it when it was delivered to Tuttle the next day. This day I wasn’t planning on waiting – I wanted to get home early and beat the storm.

So I’m working away, and the lady who was in the charge of the circulation department comes over to me. See, it’s her job to deliver all of the papers to the Tuttle Post Office for mailing out the next morning. She lived in Moore, so she would go through Tuttle on Tuesdays to deliver those papers to the back dock. But she also wanted to go home on the turnpike so she could also beat the storm. So she asked me, since it was on the way for me anyway, if I could deliver those papers to the post office.

This was a hard question for me, because I did not want to do this. However, I also realized that she was a department head, and I tried very hard to do what they asked of me…you know, be a good employee and all that.

I tried to get out of it; I really did. I told her that I had to pick up Lenora, and I didn’t want to wait a long time for papers because I’d have her with me if a storm hit. But she assured me that the printing wouldn’t take long, and that there would surely be no problem and she basically made it clear that I was going to do this regardless and thank you very much.

So there I was.

After my part was done, I hung around at the basically empty office (everybody wanted to beat the storm) and listened to the radio talking about the weather. It sounded bad. I tried to call my boss to tell him my dilemma, but his phone didn’t pick up.

As 6 p.m. neared, I drove over to pick up Lenora. The school was like a ghost town. Everybody had picked their kids to…yeah, you know; to beat the storm. I strapped Lenora in her car seat and we went back to the newspaper office. The papers were finally printing.

Then they had to have inserts put in…and be labeled…and then Lenora and I got around to the side door and we started loading them in the car. Everybody was in a hurry because the storm was starting.

And then we left for Tuttle.

Obviously it was survivable because Lenora and I are still around and it’s quite a long time later, but it was bad. It was really bad. I have never driven in worse. I could not see the road. Everything was white. There were no other cars. Sometimes I could tell where the road was, but some of the time, I couldn’t. I just kept trying to go in a straight line. By the grace of God I could see the road in the curvy spots on the road.

I went about 15 miles an hour the whole way and saw no one. Four times my windshield froze up so much I had to get out and scrape it, even with the defroster on and the wipers going. They just froze right into the ice. I stopped the car right in the middle of the road and scraped it while praying no one would come skidding up behind us.

No cell phone, of course.

By the time I got to the post office, my fingers were numb and raw, my ears were ringing and my eyes were snow-blinded. I couldn’t go all the way to the back dock because it has a ramp, and I knew I’d never get back up it in the car, so I stopped in the parking lot and slid/crawled my way to the dock with all the papers. Then I made my way back to the car and made my way home.

Lenora slept during the horrible ordeal and was annoyed to be awakened to the blustery world when we got home. Lucky she slept – if she had been crying, and I hadn’t been able to focus, who knows what might have happened?

I was never so happy to go into my warm house, wrap up in a big blanket and pull my chair by the fire.

My memorable experience delivering papers.

Did you ever hitchhike?

Excuse me? Did I ever hitchike? Hells, no. Raped and murdered ain’t my thang.

I have ridden with strangers, though. I know. Super-smart. I know I did when I was a kid and missed the bus once. This nice guy came along and offered me a ride (this was on our rural little road.) I don’t know who he was and I’m very glad he wasn’t a serial killer. I was probably about 12 or so, so I was ripe for doing something dumb.

I got a ride from someone when my car broke down on the way back to Alva, from Enid, once. Well, that’s not being completely honest. My car did break down, but it was after I thought it would be fun to take the back road between Carmen and Dacoma, and the main back road was closed due to flooding, and I’d already come way too far so I took a road that went from bad to worse. When I attempted to ford what was basically a river in the middle of the “road,” the Camaro gave it up. Turned out to be a good thing too, because there was a drop off right in front of the car and I would have been in major trouble. God was surely looking out for me that day. I took off my shoes and waded to the road, then went, with mud to my ankles, to a house that turned out to be abandoned. Walking on, I ran into people in a truck and I figured I might as well go for it, as my sitation was bleak anyway. I don’t remember anything else (or even if I actually got a ride with them – I assume I did because what else could I have done?) but I’m still here typing, with no weird flashbacks or anything, so I guess it all went okay.

I always feel sorry for hitchhikers. I want to pick them up and help them. But I also do not want to be murdered so I have to let them walk. It was always nice to be in the Malibu with all five seats taken by Ben and me and the kids. Can’t feel guilty when there’s no place for the hitchhiker to go.

Ben thinks that he would like to be a hitchhiker-type guy, or a hobo or something, and ride the rails and eat beans out of a can and see the country or something. I say he’d better go in the fall because he hates pollen (spring), heat (summer), and cold (winter.) I guess he could start being a hobo in September and then maybe call me to pick him up near the end of October.

I would not like to be a hobo. Like hitchhiking, girl-hoboing sounds like another really good way to be raped/murdered.

Hey hey, I actually remembered to do this twice in a row. Could this be because I am glued to this new laptop 24/7? Could be!

Here is number two on the big journal entry site.

Describe your neighborhood bully.

Okay. I’ll start right here and say that I can’t answer this straight out, because we didn’t have a neighborhood bully. We didn’t really have a neighborhood. I grew up in a rural area, on a road with a neighbor on each side. The next nearest neighbor was an older couple, and then some littler kids lived past them. I knew them from the school bus, but only made the trek over there a couple of times.

The kids on either side of us were more our age. It was actually kind of a nice thing that we all were of comparable ages.

To the south of our place were the H family. Becky was in my grade at school, and we played together quite a bit. We had a pool and ponies; they had horses and a three-wheeler. They also had a pool, later, but ours was bigger and deeper.

I liked playing with Becky, but we got mad at each other sometimes. I loved riding with her on the three-wheeler. I would always ride behind Becky, with my arms around her. It was exhilarating and sometimes scary. There were hot places you didn’t want to touch with your bare leg. Experience made Becky more confident, and she would bend into the turns. I bent away from the turns.

We weren’t friends when we got older, and that was really a shame. I don’t even really understand why. I guess it was just the proximity that made us friends (my mom called us playmates) and we didn’t click otherwise. I was pretty nerdy, and Becky was mean a couple of times at school but friendly at home, and that didn’t fit well with me. Not that I blame her or anything. It’s hard enough to fit in during school days without having to stick up for your nerdy neighbor!

I vibrantly remember sneaking the Flintstones vitamins from our house and taking them triumphantly to Becky’s, and our eating them while we rode the three-wheeler. I remember she had a lamb, and she gave the lamb a bite of a carrot and then bit off the same carrot. I remember she had a horny toad. She was an excellent horsewoman, even as a little girl. She called her grandparents Granny and Pa, and I called them that too, in my head, but I didn’t address them as that. I called them Mr. and Mrs. H. Once, after we weren’t playmates anymore, I couldn’t find our pony, Crystal. I found her over at Becky’s (our parents opened the gates between the fields so the animals had both areas to roam) and Becky had saddled and bridled her, with a bit. I took Crystal home.

The neighbors on the other side were the A family. They were all older than me, but Jeff was only one year older. He was a boy, though, and I had no brothers, and he was better friends with my sister Marissa than me anyway.

One time I got hurt over there, and my mouth was bleeding bad, and Jill wouldn’t let me and Marissa in the house to clean it up because she said her mother wasn’t home and she would get in trouble if we made a mess, so we had to walk home with me bleeding the whole way. Mom was mad.

Janna was outside once and asked me if we were going anywhere for Spring Break, and I told her yes, to my grandparents’ house in Stilwell. She informed me that I meant Stillwater. I told her I didn’t, I meant Stilwell. She told me I was wrong. I told her I thought I knew where my own grandparents lived. She went inside, and I heard voices in there. I assume she was asking her mom and dad if there was a Stilwell, Oklahoma. She came out and sullenly told me to have a good time. It made me feel good that I stood up for myself with a big kid like that. Funny how I even remember such a little thing.

Jeff had a little motorcycle. He took Marissa on it a time or two, I think, but I never got to ride on it. One time our little boy dog was getting up on their big girl dog and I said, “Look! Gladys is giving Savage a ride!” and Jeff laughed and started to say something and Marissa told him to shut up and not tell me anything. Their dog Gladys had nipples that dragged on the gravel road sometimes when she walked around. She had puppies a couple of times while we lived there – once in our barn. She killed all but one little brown one by burying them in the dirt in the barn or something like that. It was awful. The little brown one looked like our dog, Buster. Buster and Gladys were comparable in size and style, and I think he was the father of most if not all of the puppies after we moved there.

The A family also had HBO, which we still called Home Box Office back then. I remember watching “Pete’s Dragon” over there one time.

So, no bully, really, just a bunch of kids living on the same street. Marissa bullied me a little, but she was really a symphony of extremes, from fiery anger to boundless adoration. So she wasn’t a bully either.

So I have a new laptop. Hurrah! It only cost $348 and I am very happy with it. I used some of the money I will be getting from Annie. I also plan to buy Lenora a little netbook for her schoolwork. I’d better move quickly before I think of other things I “need.”

One thing about this laptop. I told myself, repeatedly, that I would quit having an excuse to not write when I had a good, fast internet connection and a good computer that I trusted to save my stuff (well, as long as I have a backup, of course). And now, here it is, and the computer is almost one full day old.

I know that writing each day is key to getting back in the swing of things. I have no idea where to start. So I found a list of journal topics (on an angelfire site, no less) and thought I’d tackle them.

The site is Journal Topics. And here is number one.

Did you ever stick up for someone?

Did I ever stick up for someone? Yes, of course. How one-dimensional would a person have to be to never, ever stick up for someone?

Not that I’m bragging or anything, because seriously, I am not very good at sticking up for anybody. I’m more of a people pleaser, really, and so sticking up for people goes way against that grain. Pleasing the person I’m face-to-face with always seems to take priority.

So my brand of sticking up for someone usually consists of something mealymouthed like, “Hey, you shouldn’t say that. He/She is okay. But I see your point too.”

Isn’t that something that Jesus talked about? I’m neither hot nor cold and distasteful to the mouth. Great.

What’s the point, anyway? It seems like, at least with people I know, that if someone is talking bad about someone else, and you say, “No, you’re wrong about that,” they will get mad and not really care that you disagree anyway. All you’ve done is probably gotten yourself in a fight too. It also seems that people I know might be mad one second, but if you just don’t get your panties in a knot, they will calm down on their own in a little bit.

Maybe the question asked if I ever stuck up for someone when they were there too – like if a bully was picking on them. That I’m not sure of. Generally in school I was the one getting picked on, not watching it happen to someone else.

Anyway. One down. 🙂