Sunday Funnies

When I was a boy, my father read the paper front to back whenever he had a chance.   Because he was usually working two jobs to  give us a better standard of living than he had as a boy, there wasn’t always time.   Sunday was a luxury.   The Sunday New Haven Register would appear at our front door and be waiting for him when we came home from church.  Like many boys, I was interested in only two sections … the sports section and the Sunday Funnies, as we called them (aka the funny papers).   Now, in our house, every section of the paper was Dad’s until he finished reading it, so I had to wait patiently until the funny papers made their way from the carefully folded stack on his lap to the wrinkled discard pile on the hassock.   Still, I couldn’t just grab them.  My Dad was a stickler for protocol.   You asked.   Nicely.  Please.   Can I please have the funnies now?  After he said yes, I could pick them up.