Carrying Words to the Door

Erin Doom

Sep 27

6 min read

Updated: Sep 27

A lifetime of delivery, from the paper route to Podvig Letters

Commemoration of the Holy Martyr Callistratus & His 49 Companions

Anno Domini 2026, September 27

Henry Petroski's Paperboy, back on my stack to reread.

THIS MORNING, about thirty minutes into an Amazon Flex route, I found myself thinking: I need this work, but I might still want to deliver even if I didn’t.

I'm not sure it would make sense. The pay is about twenty dollars an hour before I subtract the gas and the wear and tear on my car. Every mile costs something. Tires, oil, brakes, repairs: the car is paying part of the price for every package I carry to a door.

And, to keep it real, I'm a little embarrassed to be doing this at fifty-three. There's even a little shame in it. I'm not delivering Amazon packages just because I enjoy driving around Wichita in the morning. I'm doing it because I need the money. After spending twenty years leading an institute, after building national events and teaching and writing and publishing and selling books, I'm now using my own car to deliver somebody else’s packages for what remains of twenty dollars an hour after expenses.

That is humbling.

And yet I actually enjoy it.

Neither truth cancels the other. Enjoying the route doesn't improve the economics of it. It doesn't eliminate the necessity or make the embarrassment disappear. But the embarrassment doesn't make the enjoyment false either.

As I pulled up to another house this morning, I began to wonder why I like it. Then it struck me: I've been delivering things for most of my life.

The Paper Routes

I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I started delivering the Wichita Eagle. I had a neighborhood route about half a mile from my family home. Seven mornings a week, 365 days a year, I got up and carried the paper to people’s homes.

Or, more accurately, my dad got me up.

I've always hated mornings. I don't know how he did it. More often than not, he had to work his butt off just to get me out of bed. I remember his patience now far better than I remember my own resistance. He didn't just wake a sleeping boy. Morning after morning, he helped me become the kind of boy who kept a commitment.

Once I was awake and out the door, I loved it.

I rode my bicycle through the neighborhood in every kind of weather. I delivered in the rain. I delivered in high winds. I delivered in snow. Some mornings my dog, Sweetie, came with me. I can still picture the two of us moving through those nearly empty streets before most of the neighborhood was awake.

The boy hated getting up, but once he was outside in the open air and moving, he loved it.

About ten years later, after I returned from three years in Latin America, I found myself delivering the Wichita Eagle again. At first I delivered for a friend, servicing newspaper racks and dropping bundles at QuikTrips and Dillons. Then I acquired my own route, covering roughly a quarter of Wichita, and created a company with the almost comically grand name Doom’s News Incorporated.

Eventually I took on The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s, delivering them across the entire city and even beyond Wichita.

That route didn't begin in the morning. I would arrive at the Eagle around eleven-thirty at night. The newspapers might be ready at midnight, or they might not come off the press until two or three—sometimes later. Then I drove through the darkness until the work was finished.

This suited me much better. I was still keeping the hours of a paperboy, but now I could stay up instead of getting up.

Some of my fondest memories of those years are the times I delivered with people I loved. Christiane came with me, even while we were still dating. My friend Jason McFrederick, whom I have known since kindergarten, joined us some nights with his girlfriend and eventual wife, Kerensa. We turned work in the middle of the night into something like an outing. There were papers to move, racks to fill, miles to cover, and a deadline waiting for us on the other side of darkness. But we were together, and that made the work an adventure.

Then came a long break from delivery.

Or so it seemed.

As burnout and financial pressure forced my time at Eighth Day Institute to wind down, I went to work at UPS. I began on preload, unloading and transporting the extra-heavy packages to the trucks before dawn. That led to seasonal driving, and seasonal driving led to a full-time delivery position.

I loved the hardness of that job. I loved walking more than ten miles a day. I loved the lifting, the heat, the sweat, the exhaustion. I had spent years working with books, ideas, events, and people; now my work was unavoidably physical. There was no way to think or talk my way around the next package. I had to pick it up, carry it, and put it where it belonged.

Long before I gave the phrase its present prominence, UPS was teaching me to choose hard.

And now here I am, delivering again.

The Route Becomes a Workshop

Amazon Flex is different from every earlier route. Most of my fondest delivery memories involve other people: my dad patiently getting me out of bed and occasionally joining me (especially on the mornings with bad weather), Christiane riding with me through the night, Jason and Kerensa turning the route into an adventure, and even my dog Sweetie trotting beside my bicycle. But this time, what I cherish is being alone.

The route gives me room to think. My body is occupied. The next turn is marked. The next package has an address. For a few hours, the world becomes beautifully simple: drive here, find this house, carry this package, set it at the door, take the picture, move again.

And while my hands and feet do that work, my mind wanders.

I think. I remember. I pray. And with each stop, a memory or question comes along for the ride. An old connection becomes visible; a sentence arrives before I can finish the delivery. Soon my brain is on fire, and I'm speaking notes into my phone between stops so I won't lose them.

The Amazon route has become my Podvig Workshop.

Before I had that name for it, though, I had the route. Perhaps this kind of solitude was present in all those earlier years and I simply didn't recognize it. A delivery route occupies enough of the mind to establish a rhythm but leaves enough of it free to roam. The road becomes a kind of cloister: quiet, though never still or free of interruptions, and bounded by a rule. There's a place to go, a task to complete, and a repeated movement from the road to the door and back again.

Writing this reminded me of Henry Petroski’s Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer. It's now on my stack to reread. Petroski looks back on delivering the Long Island Press in Queens during the 1950s and recognizes in the practical problems of the paper route the early formation of the engineer and writer he would become. The route was not merely something he did before his real life began. It was already teaching him how to see.

I'm not an engineer. But perhaps the routes were forming a writer.

They taught me to notice weather. They taught me the texture of neighborhoods before dawn and after midnight. They taught me the pleasure of movement and the dignity of finishing a physical task. They gave me solitude, and they gave me companionship. They taught me that the same work can be both hard and joyful, both necessary and chosen, both humbling and good.

And perhaps delivery itself has always carried more meaning for me than I understood.

For years I delivered newspapers. Through Eighth Day, I carried books and ideas. Then I delivered packages. Now, as I begin Podvig, I find myself returning to physical letters, printed cards, commonplace books, and books worth peddling—things meant to be held, carried, opened, read, and kept.

The objects keep changing, but the action remains the same. I've spent much of my life carrying words to people’s doors.

Maybe Amazon Flex is merely something I have to do for a season. I hope there comes a day when I no longer need those twenty dollars an hour. I hope Podvig grows strong enough to support my family without every hour of income costing me gasoline, mileage, and another small portion of my car.

But I don't want to despise this season because I'm embarrassed by it.

At fifty-three, I'm once again a delivery boy. That's not the whole truth about me, but it is true. And on these morning routes, carrying packages from the car to one unfamiliar door after another, I'm beginning to see that the delivery boy has been there all along.

Perhaps he's not an interruption of the work I'm meant to do.

Perhaps he has been preparing me for it.