I Would Prefer Not To - (#5)
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Pub Day Arrives
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. —Winston Churchill
Send The Dead
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Ten Thousand Repetitions
by Richard Dooling
When I was a boy in the 1960s, long before the Internet and 24-hour news cycles, people didn't get their news by scrolling through feeds on phones and tablets. No, they got their news from me. I was a paper boy. A professional! As were my brothers and most of my friends.
The Catholic grade school we attended in Omaha, Nebraska was a short walk from Paper Station H at 40th and Cuming, where we paper boys, thirty or forty strong, gathered every day after school with print-smeared canvass bags slung over our shoulders.
The paper station manager sat behind a battered desk on the only chair in the room and harangued us about collecting from deadbeat subscribers by Saturday, or the money would come out of our pockets.
We paper boys sprawled on our backs on long wooden tables and waited for the truck from downtown to bring bundles of the Omaha World-Herald, evening edition.
The manager passed around handfuls of rubber bands, which we did not need, because we were experts at folding and tucking newspapers into tight rolls that could survive a long toss onto a front porch. No rubber bands needed, but we took them anyway because, while we waited for the truck, which was often late, we used the rubber bands to shoot flies off the ceiling.
Go ahead and be skeptical that a nine-year-old shooting a rubber band off the tip of his left index finger could kill a fly on a high ceiling, but I assure you it was a skill so easily mastered that we were soon jaded fly assassins looking for something with a little more razzle-dazzle.
How about shooting a rubber band to put out a lit match at ten paces? Also so easy that we soon specified that one had to "snuff" the flame without hitting the head of the match itself, no consolation prize for guttering the flame without putting it out.
The manager volubly disapproved of us playing with matches in a newspaper station, so we were soon back on the tables shooting flies off the ceiling. It was so easy to kill the flies, we began wagering on whether it was possible to just "wing" them by turning one's shooting finger sideways and attempting to injure the fly without killing it.
Wanton boys, we soon observed that properly "winged" flies usually fell to the table and crawled in circles, clockwise if the fly had a damaged right wing, and counterclockwise if the injury was to the left wing. As in billiards, the marksman now had to call his wing shot before firing. "Left!"
Such were the skills I acquired in my formative paper-boy years. These days progressives fret that making fourth graders carry Sunday papers over a two-mile route through subzero Nebraska blizzards amounts to child abuse, whereas conservatives want to hear about how important it was for me to work and earn money at an early age, collect payments from subscribers, show up every day and make sure people got their newspapers on time.
Maybe, but I think I learned more from shooting rubber bands at flies. The same lessons that Malcolm Gladwell once turned into an entire book called Outliers, whose central premise is the unsurprising idea that if you do something a lot, you'll probably get good at it, whether it's rewriting sentences, programming computers, shooting free throws, parenting, napping, or hunting spider monkeys with a blow gun in the tree canopy of an Amazon jungle.
These skills, once embedded, may atrophy over the years, but like riding a bicycle, one never forgets. Forty-some years after I delivered my last newspaper, I was on a book tour, speaking to readers in a bookstore somewhere in the Midwest. In the middle of my presentation an aggressive wasp flew into the room and began dive bombing members of the audience, causing a stir when people covered their heads and moved away.
When the wasp landed on one of the light fixtures, I asked the audience if anyone had a rubber band.
I don't remember if I sold any books that day, but I received a standing ovation when the wasp fell to the floor in two pieces.
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