My brother reminisces about his early years with a paper route when we are together and having a glass of wine. He had a 6am morning route of the San Jose Mercury News, a mammoth paper requiring more than two hands to hold it in order to roll the papers into plastic bags on rain days. I helped sometimes but not too often and so he was left to the goodwill of friends to get it out on time.
This one particular morning was foggy and bone-chillingly cold. He and his two buddies were in the garage folding papers and the idea was hatched to deliver the papers by car. He snuck into the house for the keys and they rolled the car out of the garage silently.
In the street two boys positioned themselves on the roof, legs wrapped through the windows and around the door jambs, and the least experienced driver was behind the wheel.
The streets were nearly deserted. Jerry kept it pretty slow and the guys on the roof wiggled toward the center to hang on and toss the papers left and right. It was going pretty well until they hit the parked car.
The boys and papers flew over the hood and onto the lawn, and after an astonished moment, they scrambled up and dove into the back seat for a getaway. They finished the route from inside the car and quietly pushed the car back into the garage and replaced the keys.
This was quite an adventure! It took a while for the boys to calm down, but once they did and surveyed the damage, it wasn't too bad: just a dent in the fender with some paint scrapes. So they decided to wash the car and buff it out, and while they were doing that, they noticed water pooling on the roof from the large dent that had formed.
The collective weight of their butts was around 300 lbs (plus papers) and no way could they hide that. They tried everything. And so it was decided that they would just let it ride.
It actually took about a week for the dent to be noticed. When he was called on the carpet for it, you know that brother of mine was able to convince Mom that it must have always been there and she probably had never noticed it before.
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