My first job in journalism—long before I knew that I wanted to write, and decades before I became a foreign correspondent—was delivering newspapers for the Columbia Missourian. I started at 5 A.M. on February 1, 1979, during one of those cold, snowy winters that used to be common in mid-Missouri. The front page featured a photograph of two local children playing in the snow, and a fifty-four-point headline carried news from a distant world: “TRIUMPHANT KHOMEINI RETURNS TO TEHRAN.” The paper consisted of thirty-four pages, and had a cover price of fifteen cents. Along with my older sister, Amy, I folded the newspapers and set out with a list of addresses. Our father accompanied us on the first day, but after that we were on our own.

Amy and I planned to share the route, and our earnings would help pay the fees at a summer camp. At the age of nine, I was probably too young to deliver papers, but Amy, at thirteen, was almost certainly too old. She was striking, with black hair, a fair complexion, and cat-green eyes; people noticed Amy wherever she went. During the spring, we alternated paper-route days, but I could tell that she didn’t enjoy it. A few times, she woke me at 5 A.M., claimed to be sick, and asked me to substitute. I noticed that Amy tended to feel bad on Wednesdays and Sundays, when the paper was heavy with extra ads and special sections.

We had always gotten along well, perhaps because our personalities were so different. Amy was easygoing and extroverted, and I was not; she thrived at school, which I hated. Almost everything that my sister disliked about the paper route was something that appealed to me. I liked waking up early, and I liked the repetition. I liked the fresh smell of the newspapers that were dropped off in a stack every morning at the end of our driveway. I liked the official paperwork: the stop notices, the new-subscriber slips. The Missourian’s circulation department sent these forms in white envelopes that read:

GOOD SERVICE IS GOOD BUSINESS PROPER & PUNCTUAL DELIVERY BUILD BIG PROFITS FOR YOU

Mostly, I liked the silence and solitude. Back then, in a small Midwestern city, almost nobody exercised before dawn, and dog-walkers were rare. The one I saw most frequently was on the address list that I had memorized: Glenn Wood, 110 South Garth Avenue. The first time I did the route alone, he was out in front of his house with his dog. He introduced himself, and he told me that the dog was named Sadie. Then he gave me a quarter.

I came home excited. The route paid a little more than a dollar a day, so a quarter tip was significant. A couple of days later, Mr. Wood gave me another quarter. When I mentioned his name to my parents, they recognized him as the city clerk who signed municipal notices that appeared in the paper. He was in his early sixties, and part of his face was covered with a large purple birthmark. My mother referred to such discolorations, in respectful terms, as “raspberries”—a quiet woman at our church had a similar blemish. Like all physical deformities, raspberries were a sign of inner goodness, or at least that was an idea I had picked up from the Bible and from things the priest said in sermons.