My Turn: Delivering good deeds one neighbor at a time

I was just 12, so I can’t remember his name, but he was whippet-thin and he always said, “Stand back, men,” when he clipped the wires that hugged the Newsday bundles.

“You don’t want to get hit with this,” he explained as he started his count. “It will cut you good.”

“Danny, here’s your 50. Got your bag?” I held up the canvas Newsday bag he had given me the week before. It had a flap to keep out the rain.

“You’re a good man,” he said. “Your bike OK? Got good air in your tires? This is a heavy load."

He handed me the stack of papers and I placed them in the bag just as he had shown me. “You remember how to fold them so they don’t come apart?”

I took one, held it horizontally and folded the top and bottom of the paper toward each other and then tucked one end inside the other so it stayed together.

“That’s good. Keep ’em tight. That’s what the customers like. Now get going. Be safe.”

I headed off to my 50 houses, all clustered around Burns Avenue School in Hicksville. My old school.

“I’m a working man now,” I said to no one as I tried my best to keep the heavy bag balanced on my Schwinn’s handlebars. No rain today. Good.

I knocked on my customers’ doors on Saturdays.

“Collect,” I’d say.

Some would pay me and give me a nickel tip. Others would tell me to come back next week, giving me a lesson in accounts payable and accounts receivable.

The whippet taught me.

“If you don’t get paid, you still gotta pay me,” he said. “Every week.”

I tried harder.

Eventually, I outgrew my Schwinn, got a job selling hot pretzels at Mid Island Plaza when it had no roof, worked as a door-to-door milkman, fell in love, got married, and went to work in the heating industry. Go figure.

We have lived in Bethpage since 1977. Marianne and I raised four daughters, put them through college and paid for their weddings. Grandkids? You bet. Six of them.

Each morning since I retired, I wake naturally at 5. I open the door and check the weather. Then I dress appropriately and start my walk. It’s the same each day, five miles though a biscuit-shaped piece of Bethpage, much of it taking me back and forth through streets like laces on a sneaker.

I see the people who deliver the newspapers, mostly Newsday and the New York Post.

I bend and pick up the papers and carry them to the neighbors’ front doors. No one has those mailboxes with the newspaper hooks anymore. I just drop the papers on the unhinged side of the storm doors and move on. It feels good to bend and stretch.

The Newsday guy drives a sport utility vehicle. His windows are open, and I marvel at how skilled he is at tossing the papers left and right, barely slowing down as he goes. They land perfectly on each driveway and never slide under a car.

He doesn’t play the radio. We pass each other on the sneaker-lace streets three times each dawn. We wave on the first pass. We never speak. He doesn’t know that I’m doing the last mile.

Now and then, one of my neighbors wakes early and comes to the door as I approach the stoop, their paper in my hand. “You’re the guy!” they’ll say.

“Yes.”

“I can’t tell you how much this means to us, especially when the weather is lousy. You’re always there. Can I give you something?”

“No,” I say. “But thanks. Enjoy the day.”

“I can’t thank you enough!”

“No need to,” I say. “It’s my job.”

Dan Holohan,

Bethpage