I had three different paper routes when I was 13. Monday through Saturday I delivered the Rockford Morning Star and the Chicago Tribune, which were morning papers, so I’d get up at 5 a.m. and make the rounds on my bike. On Sunday it was the Milwaukee Journal. I had about 40 customers on Sunday and the papers were thick and heavy, so I had to make several trips because I couldn’t carry them all at once—so I had to get up at 3 a.m. on Sundays.

I delivered year-round but I had made a deal with the Geezers: if it was ten below zero or colder, they’d give me a ride in the car. So I was especially ornery one Sunday morning in January when I looked at the thermometer and it said seven below. Not cold enough to wake up the Geezers at 3 a.m., but cold enough for me to freeze my… bottom off.

It wasn’t just cold that morning; it was also extremely windy. The wind was blasting at about 25-30 miles an hour. It took me half an hour just to pedal down to the Mobil gas station, where the Sunday papers were waiting for me in a huge stack. I was already frozen through when I got there. My hands were numb and my face felt red and cracked.

I cut the wire that was holding the stack of papers together and a huge gust of wind blew the first paper right out of my hands. In less than a second that paper had disintegrated, with pieces of it flying every which way. I couldn’t even try to chase them down and reassemble the paper, because I was struggling to hold the other papers in place.

And then something in me just snapped. I picked up the next paper on top of the stack and just threw it high up in the air. The wind caught it and blew it to pieces and it was gone. I did the same with the next paper. Then I kicked the rest of the stack so that it toppled over. There were papers blowing everywhere. And I got back on my bike and just rode home.

I was so cold when I got home that I curled up on the floor in front of the heater vent in my sleeping bag, so that the warm air blew directly into the sleeping bag. And I went to sleep, knowing the phone would be ringing in a couple of hours. But I didn’t care. There just wouldn’t be any papers for anyone today.