On Sunday morning there is a moment when I hesitate before I head out the door to scoop up our newspaper from the driveway. “Oh, that’s right,” I tell myself. The Sunday paper is no more.

“I miss it,’’ my wife Dede tells me. She is a puzzle doer, and the day isn’t right if they resist her skills. She uses puzzles to measure cognitive sharpness. As for me, I just hope for the best.

So far, so good, as far as I can tell. But would I be the first to know?

My history with Sunday newspapers goes back at least 60 years, when I helped my older brother with his paper route. The Sunday Evening Bulletin was thick, probably more than 100 pages, plus gobs of inserts. Over and over I would fill two paper bags, one against each hip, and lumber like a drunken penguin. Our route was long, around 100 customers, and some homes were triple-deckers. I trudged up and up, a news Sherpa.

Newspapers used oily ink that rubbed off. In summer it spread from my hands to my brow when I wiped off sweat. I don’t know exactly how I looked — this was before selfies — but I recall a customer saying something about coal mines. I should have appealed to President Kennedy and the Department of Labor, but we were independent contractors under the law. 

Something about those days made me think the newspaper industry was just the place for me, coal mining being on the decline. If I didn’t have ink in my veins, it surely was on my forehead.

My family was loyal to the Providence paper, but we also got the Sunday New York Times. In many ways I was an average boy, attracted to bikes, dirt, comic books and tomfoolery. 

But sometimes I read book reviews and opinion pieces I could only somewhat comprehend. It served me well to encounter an intellectual realm beyond boy-stupid, my natural comfort zone.

The golden age of Sunday newspapers for me came later, in the 1970s, when the Boston Globe Sunday Sports Section was so good it was worth the price of the paper. It had a murderer’s row (from the 1927 Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig, not prison) of talented sportswriters.

They were ace reporters and fine writers, and actually liked sports. They weren’t cheerleaders, but some things about athletes — we all have flaws — were left unsaid. Heroes had their time.

I have dim memories of reading the Globe sports section once in a claw-foot tub suited for luxuriating. It could have been heaven, but water and newsprint don’t mix. Every turn of the page was flirting with disaster. 

The Sunday papers were stuffed with advertising that paid for editors and reporters: car ads, department store ads, tire ads, classified ads, and Earl Sheib’s claim that “I’ll paint any car any color for $59.95.” My mother took him up on the offer with her Dodge Dart. Voila — it ended its days with a crummy shade of purple — mushy plum.

The Valley News got into the Sunday newspaper business in 1993, with a separate staff who insisted its formal name was the Sunday Valley News and were annoyed when Monday-Saturday editors and reporters overlooked that. I wasn’t crazy about it at first. The Saturday paper had been pretty substantial and often featured our best work. 

I was wrong. The Sunday paper became a staple and a regular award winner. The Sunday editorial was often the weightiest, from our best editorial writer (not me). I was good for something short and cheerful about the winner of a hot dog eating contest.

The current Saturday paper fills the void, but newspapers aren’t the pulp banquets they once were. So many ads went to Neverland, that is, online. So now, on Sunday, we readers are left to our own devices. We could go to church and reintroduce ourselves. We could take a Sunday drive, fill up the tank before prices rise. Power naps are always in fashion, or remote virtual yoga — watch a video from your couch as you stretch and yawn.

There are always chores to do, but I like to remember spending time with the Sunday paper — an unhurried read, and multiple sections chock full of long stories for thinking people to mull over. Did we really have time for that?

Now national news is an onslaught: it rattles us by day and shakes us in the night. All is not well, it blares, and we must stay tuned, click on this and that, react to it, to all of it.

Dan Mackie lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.