Let's move on with what is good

Dear friends, here is a holiday story for you. This is a time for all of us to work towards mending the wounds of the past few years, myself included.

This year I was called to teach for a couple of months in a no-stoplight town at the edge of the Palouse, a place where I’ve seen my students drive combines down the street. The principal, my old boss and friend, needed a Spanish teacher; his regular teacher was recovering from surgery. I rallied the old me for a while, the person I was almost 18 years ago.

Time passes by much slower on the Palouse, sometimes the messages of the modern world don’t quickly reach those homes dropped in the middle of those vast wheat fields. One might be surprised at the changes happening there, though. Walk down the hallway and you will see a change in the framed, graduating class photos lining the walls. At one end of the hallway, the graduating classes are small, mostly farm kids of European descent. Continue walking down the hallway and the class sizes grow bigger, more diverse, representing the immigrants, some refugees of political violence, who came from the southern border. These students also embrace the fishing, hunting, farming culture. The community here has been known to rally their dozers and other equipment to build those much needed sports complexes. They will spend thousands of dollars more than needed to purchase a prized animal raised by kids in the local FFA students.

Also during my visit, an old student contacted me asking to write a piece on what some women at the Yakama Nation Reservation were doing for their community and other tribal nations in the Pacific Northwest. I was able to spend two weekends helping to load necessary goods into the cars, watching facial stress lines momentarily relax before recipients drove away. The women here are also investing in the future. When children come to school hungry or stressed because families must choose between paying the bills or buying food, the children can’t learn and grow beyond the feelings of inadequacy passed down by boarding schools and broken treaties. The piece that I wrote was beautifully flawed and not acceptable to publish, but the connections I made will last a lifetime.

I still think that someone needs to write something about what the Peacekeeper Society is doing down there. The podcast, War Cry, is worth a listen.

The holiday story you are about to read is meant to be warm hearted, reminding us that we don’t always know what is going on in another person’s life. A car driving aggressively on the highway might be someone rushing to the hospital. A family with a big house with the fancy RV in front might be in serious debt. In this story, the hill on Carter Avenue and the interaction between the paperboy and the client are true. However, I did change the location of the interaction. The client may have even been a woman, but that will remain a secret.

Finally, be careful of the nostalgia that the story may invoke. There may be elements of good here, but that paperboy would not want to go door-to-door collecting in 2023. People are too busy consuming hateful biases through social media algorithms. Like I said before: “Let’s move on with what is good and leave the bad behind as lessons never to be forgotten.’

What’s that noise?

“What was that noise?” The paperboy looked back down the hill, then to the right; nothing. He didn’t dare look left into the woods. The night came early in December, and the shadows in those woods were playing games with his imagination. He was afraid of the dark.

The boy ran a three-block paper route in Parkview Terrace, a neighborhood punched out of the southern woods of Kitsap County. At his fastest pace, the route only took seventeen and a half minutes to complete on bicycle. He finished that over an hour ago, right after school got out. The almost $100 a month he earned from his 47 clients added up to a lot of money for a kid in the 1980s, most of it going into his savings account.

A rustling of salal leaves from the woods startled the paperboy again. He stood up on his pedals to push harder up the hill on Carter Avenue. It felt like one of those dreams where he was trying to run but couldn’t lift his legs. Carter hill wasn’t that steep.

He didn’t notice the small raindrops until he reached the top of the hill. At least he knew that the noise in the woods was just pitter-patter on the salal. He wanted to get home before the drops became thicker and heavier. His new-fangled stretchy gloves were already damp from an earlier deluge but he still needed to complete the task at hand before he could return to his warm, Butler Avenue home.

Nearly out of breath, the paperboy rounded the corner and peddled another block. Some of the houses resembled silhouettes disappearing into the night. He stopped in front of one house with a lit window, reminding him that his warm home was less than a block away.

He pulled a small three-ring binder from his backpack. Collecting money from clients was the most dreaded part of the job, but it had to get done. He opened the binder and flipped through pages of perforated card stock until he found the right name and address of the house. Each time a client paid, he tore off one perforated square with the month printed on it. He hand wrote the date when he received the money.

The rain began to fall in dollops now, dampening the pages, despite his attempt to shield the binder with his body. He should have put it in plastic before going back out to collect. Too late, gotta do it now, he thought as he rested his bicycle on the ground and pressed the doorbell.

“Oh it's you.” The man at the door greeted the boy with an exhausted half-smile. “How can I help you?”

“I'm here to collect for last month.”

“Let the boy in, it’s cold outside,” said the man’s wife from the living room.

“Weren’t you here last week?” The man asked.

“Yes, but…” The paperboy showed him the open binder, looking down in embarrassment by the damp cardstock.

The man looked down at the evidence then back at the boy. Did he think the boy had replaced the old card with a new one, making it look like the man didn’t pay? It was possible for sure. However, the boy knew that Parkview Terrace wasn’t a rich neighborhood, most of the people were blue-collar families trying to get a start in life, sometimes good business meant patience and persistence. This man had told him to come back later twice the previous month. That’s why he was back so soon to collect.

They stood there in silence as a Christmas movie played in the background, both exhausted from a day’s work, a silent standoff in Santa’s presence. The paperboy started to think this man was trying to get a free month from him? This man had nice things in his house while the family down the street with a dirt lawn and a junked car in the driveway always paid on time.

“Ok, give me a moment.” The man disappeared into the other room, and the boy heard the shuffling of coins.

The man came back to the entryway, the tension lifted from his face. He counted out the four dollars he owed. “I’m sorry for the delay,” he said.

“That’s ok, I'll see you in a month.” The boy handed him a soggy square from the cardstock before peddling home.

Carl L. Bivens Jr. is a writer and teacher who has worked in Kitsap County and around the state. He grew up in Port Orchard, delivering the Kitsap Sun, and occasionally submits essays for the opinion page.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Your turn: Let's move on with what is good