The Cab Stand

Addresses.   Simple things, yes?

Among the reasons I’ve chosen to spend my closing years driving a cab is that it’s a simple endeavor.   No employees to manage, no legal department, no returns desk.

You need a ride?   You call a taxi company and order a cab.   Maybe you’ll get my cab.   If you do, I’ll hold the door for you.   I’ll load your groceries or luggage or your wheelchair.   I’ve paid for the gasoline, and I’ve paid for the insurance.   The cab is mechanically sound, I can assure you.   All you need do is settle into the back seat and tell me where you’d like me to take you and all of your things now stuffed into my trunk.

 ”Where can I take you?”

A simple thing…   a destination…   what did you see in your mind’s eye when you ordered your ride?   You did envision a result, some conclusion to this exercise, did you not?  

This does not occur to some people, this concept of destination, result, conclusion…

 ”Where can I take you?” 

I realize that the question is properly worded “Where may I take you”, but that’s stilted verbiage.   The use of “can” in place of “may” or even “might” shouldn’t be so dissonant as to cause paralysis in my passengers, yet often enough it does precisely that.

 ”Where can I take you?” is, at least once each day, met with a confused silence or a shuffling of papers in a woman’s purse.   Men who are confounded by this question do a search-every-pocket routine.   Destinations, it seems, are timid creatures that hide in shadowy places, elusive, reticent.

 ”Where can I take you?”     “To see my sister”     “And where is your sister?”     “At her house.”

 ”Where can I take you?”     - uncomfortable pause -     “I’ll be right back.   I left it inside…”

 “Where can I take you?”     “They didn’t tell you?”

 ”Where can I take you?”     “The same place as last time.”

 “Where can I take you?”     “Walgreens.”     “Which one?”     “In Lakewood.”     “There are two in Lakewood…  which one would you like?”     “The one with my prescription.”

   and, the one that really doesn’t fly…

 ”Where can I take you?”     “I’ll show you…”

No, ma’am and no, sir…   you will not show me.   For a dozen reasons and then a dozen more, you will not show me.   You will tell me, and then we will proceed on our merry way, you relaxing in back and me driving you in style.   You will not show me.   You will not show me because of the good chance that you don’t really know how to get where you’re going, while I, had I but an address, do.   You will not show me because of the even better chance that you’ll tell me to make a turn when I’m seven feet from the intersection with a tailgater carefully examining the cab’s rear bumper…   and then, mid-turn, you will decide that it was actually a left, not a right.

You will not show me because we use a zone system to determine fares, not a meter, and I am disinclined to meander about the countryside when I am only allowed to charge you x for the ride.   You will not show me because “I’ll show you” is one of the most popular destinations for people who rob cab drivers.   And finally, you will not show me because I’m legally obligated to take you to the place you specified at the outset of the ride.   If I do not do that, then I have kidnapped you.   Legally.   It’s true.   So, you will not show me.   You’ll tell me, or we don’t go at all.

 ”Where can I take you?”   “The Key Tower on Publlic Square.”

There now…  that didn’t hurt, did it?

 Tippi Hedren

     Helen was a beauty, in her late 60s or maybe even early 70s,    5′5″ or so, 105 or 110 lbs. I would guess…   and I’d have to guess, because Helen was an old school belle, the sort of woman you wouldn’t dare ask about years and pounds and such.   She was slim-hipped with a tiny waist, and had a perfectly rounded, perfectly proportioned derriere.   Oxford shirts with the top two buttons undone and beige-toned slacks were her normal attire, sensible shoes and a simple purse were her accessories.   She could’ve easily passed as Tippi Hedren’s plainer-dressing sister.

     I drove Helen to her hairdresser each week, her hair color specialist once each month ( she adored her hairdresser but didn’t trust her with color ), and to a wide variety of doctors on what was, unfortunately, a schedule with intervals that were increasingly brief.

     We met because she rode cabs to and from her job at the Baby Gap, and there was a certain comfortable electricity between us from the beginning, no matter that I was fifteen or more years her junior.   Helen jabbered, and while that would normally drive me to distraction, her jabbering was fun somehow…   almost a taxicab pillow talk if you can imagine such a thing.   The topics of her almost-monologues ranged from crises in her work-a-day world to wistful memories of vacations in Italy… in her last months, after she had retired and gone to live with her daughter’s family, and after her health began to fail, I was her private sounding board.   My cab became her confessional, and I her confessor.   I suspect that as a practical matter, she had no other sanctuary that she considered absolute.  

     And had she not taken ill, I also suspect that the confessional would have eventually extended to my bed.

     A curious thing, that…   I have had, in my life, only two lovers older than me, one by a month, the other by only a bit more than a year…   two out of…  well, many.   I did have a prolific youth.   But that’s off on a tangent to the point of this exercise.   Which is…  

     That I find it especially curious, this emotional/physical/sensual attraction to Helen, because it seems to have marked a turning point in me…   once upon a time, the very idea of boinking a 70ish grandmother was repulsive, outlandish, and absurd.   In the abstract, such thoughts are still beyond my mind’s pale.   But, through the process of coming to know Helen and the glimmers of desire that this process produced, I now find myself able to see ( at least some ) senior women as women…   complete and viable creatures and not shadows of lives already acted and awaiting only the stagehands’ removal of the sets.   Revelations realized from behind a steering wheel…

     I miss Helen.   I think I miss what might have been.   I think it would have been fun, and tender, and sweet…   and somehow, I think it might have been a surprise adventure for us both.   I know a part of her was lonely and in need when she died…   the sort of loneliness and need that even the best of families ( and she did love hers ) cannot fill.   Helen was a mother and grandmother, a career woman and a widow when death came for her.   She should have also been someone’s lover, and someone’s love.