meter maid | manager at the ice cream shop

The only good thing about that job, as I recall, was the house about halfway through my route with the teenage daughters. Knocking on that door was like knocking on the door to Shangri-la. The house smelled of dinner roasting as I approached. The dad, who always answered the door, was a welcoming guy who joked with me while fumbling for his money in the doorway. I would try hard not to be too obvious as I subtly craned my neck around him to catch a glimpse of his daughters as they danced through the living room, blond hair trailing them on a nonexistent wind. On that doorstep, even in the darkest, coldest winter, it was warm. And the dad tipped well. Sometimes he let me keep the change on a buck.

Other than that, being a paperboy stunk. So, me, I did not remember my first job fondly.

But the folks around the table weren't remembering their earliest jobs, invariably summer jobs, like I remembered mine. One guy worked in an ice cream shop and was told he could eat all the ice cream he wanted. "You'll get tired of it," he was told. "I didn't," he remembered. Another was a meter maid in a small Texas town who dressed in a little meter maid outfit. "Didn't people resent you for giving them tickets?" I asked. "The tickets," she replied, "were only a quarter. Nobody seemed to mind."

Their experiences were all happy and fun. Except, it turned out, after I expressed incredulity. Then everybody started spilling their guts. When kids couldn't handle their triple-dips, the manager at the ice cream shop made my friend clean up the mess. The former meter maid recalled the guys at the coffee shop who leered out the window at her as she reached up to place a ticket on the windshield of a pickup truck.

Which brings us to my son.