My parents live still in the house where I grew up. It’s too big for their needs but memories keep it off the market.
Not that they entertain to this extent but if needed, roughly six cars could be lined up in a row on the driveway, the bottom three with their park brakes engaged as the asphalt slopes down to meet the street’s midnight black, a disappointing recent color swap. The township choose to replace the unusual crushed red stone which for two decades helped to make the address that much more bucolic. So it goes.
Across the street lives a young boy, a child of four or five, who said to his grandma, “I want to do good”.
Bless.
It’s not every morning, but on many, this young boy, this unofficial paper boy, will cross the blacktop separating his childhood home from mine. He in his little kicks, lights blinking with the fervor of a maximum home security alarm tripped by baddies, his sneakers trimmed with cartoon greens, blues and reds; he scampers over from driveway to driveway and scoops up the newspaper.
As he carries it up the steep grade to my parents garage door, the paper is folded over in half, still in its transparent plastic bag after being tossed from the window of a car before he would rise and shine for the day, before the haze of morning had burned off.
It’s a simple act of good. That’s what he wanted, what he told his grandma about maybe while he ate his cereal or watched his favorite cartoon or played with a set of wooden toys or waited for the dew on the front yard grass to dry so he could run around without dirtying his new sneakers.
The young paper boy is helping a pop pop who’s knees don’t allow him to navigate the hill like he once did. He’s doing good. The young paper boy is delivering more than a newspaper, he’s dropping off hope that there are still good young men in the world.
The good young man doesn’t know it, how could he, but he’s giving this old boy who once also lived on that street, who once also had a grandma to talk with about doing good, hope that not everything in those newspapers is everything, that there remains hope for a better tomorrow blinking fervently from the shoes and the hearts of good young men.
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