This Sunday brought a frown to my usually chipper morning face. My weekly ritual of bicycling down to the corner of 66th and 38th for the Sunday paper was thrown for a loop. Instead of a brightly festooned paperboy manning each corner, there was a ghost town.A harbinger of a simpler time, I enjoy the weekly chat with my paperboy. (I say paperboy even though Steven is probably a good thirty. There's simply no better term I know of.) There are few more dedicated scholars of the weather, for who could better tell you what the sky might do that day than a paperboy doomed to stand beneath it.
He was still there this Sunday, but today was trying to hawk the Times from back in the gas station parking lot. His fiancée had joined to lend a hand with sales, but business looked slow. Only the more dedicated will spend the moment however fleet to enter a parking lot for their paper. They had tried selling from the supermarket parking lot, but were promptly shown the other side of the road by management, shooed away like an unwanted caste.
Resembling an effort to manage an unwanted natural resource, the aim is they'll shuffle off to another town, like a flock of dejected migratory beasts in search of rumored promise. Or scuttle beneath bridges to fight over whatever scraps of society that despite the best efforts of mankind's inherent greed, somehow managed to trickle their way down to them.
I pedaled back to my air conditioned home, sipped my coffee and read Prince Valiant and Peanuts to my boy. And Steven sweated away in the oily parking lot, hoping folks would go a little farther out of their way to keep him relevant. And with that, St. Petersburg got a little less personal, and a little more barren.
Next time you see them you should thank the City Council for their campaign to spare you, a delicate citizen, the momentary inconvenience of seeing a homeless person and the pang of sadness about the world such a shock produces, however quickly evaporated. Just how comfortable does my life need to be?
