That One's a Keeper

 I'm not a great fan of poems that don't rhyme, but "Paper Warriors" is definitely a keeper.  (For the benefit of the city slickers, a keeper is a fish that you don't have to throw back because it's legally big enough to take home and eat.)  The introduction was every bit as good as the poem.  Indeed, without the introduction, I would have had a hard time understanding the poem, but that's just because I have little background in the genre.  

I never was a great fan of buses back in the day, sluggish lumbering beasts that slowed down all the other traffic on the road.  I liked trains, though, even the El, except when it went underground and there was no passing scene to watch.  Planes were cool back in the 60s but, by the 80s, they were making the planes twice as large and packing four times as many people into them, so air travel was no fun anymore.  

I kept my bicycle even after I got my driver's license because it was still the fastest way to get around the city during rush hour.  I always wondered why it was called rush hour because there was no rushing involved.  Traffic would back up from one stop light to the next, and you often had to wait for the same light two or three times.  With my bike I could ride right up to the light between the waiting cars and the curb and be off and running as soon as the light changed.  

They didn't let us bring our bikes to school, so I walked.  It was about a mile to Gage Park High, and any bus that I could have taken would have only covered half the distance.  In the time it would have taken me to walk to the bus stop, wait for the bus, and then walk from the bus stop to the school I was further ahead to just walk the whole distance.  It took me between 15 and 20 minutes, which is why I knew that I could easily walk three or four miles an hour in those days.  It wasn't until I got into the army that I found out I was no good at running, never had any reason to run before that.  Running any more than a mile made me breathless and dizzy, but I could walk all day as fast as the other guys could run.  Now I get breathless and dizzy walking a hundred yards to our mailbox, but I am no spring chicken anymore.  

(I just noticed that there is no white space at the end of this post, and I didn't do anything different.)