Ruminations Whilst Sick Abed

I have been lying abed sick for three days, a slight stomach upset, which I take to be my intestinal tract fighting off some virus or other.  The experience was not at all that different from other days, except that I did not go to my balance class or to the gym to work out with my trainer, and when reading lay back with my head propped up with pillows rather than sitting in a chair.  It gave me time to think about what I was reading, and I tentatively decided that I really don't like The Great Gatsby; there is something so phony about the characters, and maybe that is a failure on my part to register their dialogue as honest for the period in which it was written.  Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy continues to fascinate me; just yesterday I was preoccupied with his reference to the poor boys in his community having paper routes so as to earn money to help out at home.  And I remembered getting a paper route when I was fifteen which I held for a year or so, riding around on my bicycle after school, first picking the papers up at the offices of the Iowa City Press Citizen, and then folding and putting them into the large canvas bag slung over my shoulder.  I had a relatively large route, and it took me a couple of hours or so, as I remember it, when I could ride the bicycle before the snow and ice came, and then I had to walk and it took much longer.  The winds off the Dakotas sometimes made the chill factor go well below zero.  It was hard work meant "to make a man of me," according to my mother, and it did indeed accustom me to hardship and endurance, but since I was also in the process of realizing my capacity for sexual relations with other boys, I am not so sure that "the man" my mother had envisioned was emerging.  But as I lay there in bed I considered that my paper route was something I must have taken away from some much more deserving, poorer kid, surely by virtue of my name giving me preference at the paper when I applied for a route, or Mother had put in a call, who knows?  And that led me to think of the splendid English bike I had, with its--in those days--exotic thin tires, bought off a university exchange student going home to fight the war.  Which led me to think of the job I had in the summer working for the maintenance department of the public school system, again unwittingly taking work away from a teenager economically disadvantaged.  I wonder now how many low income parents and kids noticed the son of the president of the school board holding a plum summer job.  I mentioned the guilt I felt to my husband yesterday who stopped me cold by pointing out that I worked hard all summer long, that I had no idea of these possible maneuvers behind the scene and anyway we are talking about the summers of 1945 and 1946.  As many say "Give it a rest!"