The Cab Stand

The Smith Ladies ride in our cabs, and have apparently done so since well before my taxi tenure began.   Sometimes they shop, sometimes they venture out for a meal together.   The Smith Ladies are mother and daughter, exceptionally pleasant women both…  the kind of people whose existence provides a simple, elegant pleasure to all who might encounter them.   I’ve always enjoyed their company, and I consider it a privilege to take them to and from in my cab.

The Smith Ladies rode in my cab today, and it was the very best ride ever with them…  because today, Mama Smith came home from a long stay in a nursing home.

I don’t know what Mama Smith’s particular trouble was, but I do know that she was unrestrained in her joy at the prospect of returning home.   A woman of 92 all agrin like a girl of 14 is truly a thing of beauty.

———-

We began getting solo orders from Daughter Smith several weeks ago…  picking her up at the nursing home in the mornings, returning her there to stay overnight with Mom later in the day.   Each day.   Every day.   Her weariness from worry, from half-sleeping in a chair, from trying to remain alert to any possible need that her mother might have in the small hours of the night, was evident.   As was her indefatigable good cheer.   She’d sit in the back seat of my cab and muse about her mom’s interactions with the nursing home staff and with the other residents, and review aloud the chores which awaited her at the house.   Daughter Smith was very matter-of-fact about it all, simply dealing with things as another chapter in life, and harboring no doubt as to an eventual happy conclusion.

I listened, and I drove, and I expected to eventually hear bad news…   unhappy endings to such things are the norm, so my experience has taught me.   Every life is finite, every life ends.   When you deal with seniors as a matter of course, and especially when an affection for some of them grows in your heart, you’re constantly reminded of this simple fact.   I think that I’m both a romantic and a realist, so I try to savor the little joys in life while refusing to be surprised by its tragedies.   Today was a day to savor.

———-

I drove Daughter Smith home yesterday, and she told me that, barring last minute complications or some completely unforeseen problem, Mama would be coming home today.   I told her that I’d keep my fingers crossed, and that I hoped I’d be lucky enough to be their driver.   The cab company was fairly busy today, and I was running full-tilt all morning, tending to my own customers as well as dispatch’s orders…  somewhere in there:

Dispatch-  “I need a sedan in River”          Me- “‘78, I can get it if it’s fairly short…”

Dispatch- “‘78, the Normandy for Smith…”          Me- “…Smith”

I was lucky enough.

And I was able to share a 92-going-on-14 year old’s happiness in returning home on a beautiful autumn morning.   She enjoyed the colors in the trees and the crisp chill in the air as if for the first time in life, she loved that she had a “regular” driver as her escort, and she thought it grand that I had an extra blueberry muffin for her to nibble with her back-home-again coffee.   Her bantering with her daughter was innocent, girlish and musical.

Mama Smith climbed the several steps to her porch slowly, and with a bit of a struggle.   Daughter Smith held her all of the way.   Both wore smiles.

And so did I, because every now and then a daffodil will bloom in November.

 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.

I drive days.  

I’ve reached a point in life where I’m just too old and cranky to deal with the denizens of dusk and the hours beyond…   so my taxicab stories are seldom dramatic.

No matter.   I’ll tell some anyhow.

Shortly after I began driving a cab, I met Wanda.   Wanda was then in her early 80s, living with her older brother in a crackerbox house in Fairview Park, a ‘burb just west of Cleveland.   She was a tiny, hunchbacked woman, utterly nondescript, always dressed in dark slacks and a baggy blouse, with a $19.95 wig on her head.   Her sole sartorial indulgence was her footwear…   Nikes…   always like new, never a spot or a scuff…   perfect, perfect white.

Wanda would call a cab once a week to go shopping, always at her favorite Discount Drug Mart.   Never to a grocery store.   Never to a bookstore or Wal-Mart or even a bagel shop.   If it couldn’t be had at Discount Drug Mart, I guess it wasn’t worth having…  sometimes I was sent on her order, more often not, but I did drive her enough to recognize her and anticipate her singular destination.   One more old person in a region overflowing with them.

She had a gravelly voice, though she didn’t say much…  just content to keep her own counsel, I suppose, and that was fine with me…  I’m a quiet sort, too.

After a while, there were no more orders from Wanda’s address, though I only realized that in retrospect.   Customers come and go and come and go, and come and go some more, for myriad reasons, and you just accept that as a given, yes?   I do.

Several months passed before I saw Wanda again.   Early one morning, a nasty, iced-up, road-salt-tinging-everything-in-the-world kind of morning, I had a pick-up at a Cleveland nursing home…  as I slide my cab up to the front door, a familiar face is peering out from the frosted glass of the lobby doors…   yup, it’s her.   We get her in the cab, and she seems no less able than when I saw her last…

“What are you doing here?”          “eh, my brother got too fucking old, I can’t take care of him by myself anymore…”

heh…  I’d never heard her cuss before.   I would come to learn that she could cuss with the best of them…

“You going to Drug Mart?”          “…no, to my house…”          “You still have the house?”          “yeah, I hate it here… the nursing home is for my brother, I’m only here to keep him company…  I’m gonna start going back home during the day”

So I drove her home.

“Can you come back and get me later?”         “Sure.”          …and I did…

“Can you come back and get me tomorrow?”          “Sure.”          …and I did…  and by doing so, began two years of shuttling Wanda between the nursing home and her real home and, once each week, Discount Drug Mart and her bank.

She grossly overpaid me for this, and I told her several times to stop, but she insisted and said, finally, “I can depend on you, and it’s worth it to me…  if you won’t take the money, I’ll find someone else who will…”… so I shut up about it, and kept driving her back and forth six days each week, and sometimes seven.   Most of the time, when I dropped her off on Saturday afternoon, she’d say “we’ll take tomorrow off.”   Sometimes she didn’t say that.

As I mentioned, Wanda didn’t say a whole lot…  even so, when you’re driving someone around six days a week, and sometimes seven, you get to know a little bit about them:

She was a lifelong Clevelander, born to Polish immigrants, and raised in Slavic Village on the city’s east side.

She never married;  she was engaged once, but her fiance showed up the night before the wedding and wanted her to elope.   She refused, not wanting to leave however many guests and family members in a lurch the next day, so he left.   And didn’t show for the wedding…  she never saw him again.

She and her brother bought the little crackerbox shortly after that, and proceeded to spend their lives there.   I never did discover what he did for a living;  Wanda, for her part, made a career of working in a drug store warehouse…  must’ve made for a decent pension, if nothing else, and it obviously had considerable influence on her late-in-life shopping patterns.

The nursing home decided that Wanda and her brother were “Residents of the Month” one time, so she had to find memorabilia that could be used for a story in the house newsletter…  she came up with a few odds and ends that included a photo of her when she was in her 20s;  she was a seriously beautiful young woman, looked a lot like a young Liz Taylor, in fact…  as I was looking at her picture, I guess she anticipated me doing a then-and-now thing in my head because she said “I spent years and years drinking, and drinking a lot… it made me old and hunched my back.”   She said it so matter-of-factly that I had no response…  what could I say?

I picked Wanda up at the nursing home early on a Memorial Day Saturday a few years back and drove her to her house…  dropped her off and went about my day, grocery runs and airport runs and folks going downtown for the rib cook-off, with a few Lakewood drunks wandering between bars thrown in for good measure…  the day went by and then some, and Wanda’s phone call telling me she was ready to go back hadn’t come.  I waited ’til she was an hour or so past her latest-ever call, and then I called her… no answer…  called again, no answer…  one more try, no answer.   Shit.   So I drove out to the little crackerbox house…

She must’ve heard me pulling into the driveway, because as I was walking to the door I heard her yelling that she fell… can’t get up…  the doors were locked, of course…

“Help me!”          “Wanda, I can’t get in!”          “I can’t move!”          “I’ll call the police!”          “NOOOO-OOO-OOO!  They’ll break my door!”          “Wanda, I HAVE to call the police!”          “NOOOO-OOOO-OOO!”   :: she’s crying ::

I called the police;  they were quick in arriving, along with an ambulance and EMT crew.   They talked to her through the door and she was raising holy hell about not breaking anything…  the poor guys had no choice…  they used one of those small battering ram things to get the back door opened, and sure enough, she’d fallen and broken a leg.   I never did figure out how long she was lying there on the floor that day.

Two things happened when the EMT guys lifted her:

Her dollar-store wig fell off.   You know what?   Her real hair was perfectly fine…  a lovely silver, not at all thin.   I’ll never know why she wore the wig…  and;

Her baggy blouse rode up to her armpits…   she wasn’t wearing a bra…   she had a 20-year-old’s boobs and a witch’s hump on her back.   Nothing has ever struck me as being more incongruous.

Wanda was in the hospital for five days after that, giving the staff a seriously hard way to go…  I saw her three times in those five days and she was out of it for the most part, heavily drugged.   The fourth time I went to see her, the nurse on duty told me she’d been sent to the nursing home for recovery…  where, within a week, she had a heart attack, and died.

I suppose I was the closest thing Wanda had to a friend in her last couple of years, although I don’t think either of us would have called it a friendship, exactly…  for me it was business mostly, plus a feeling of responsibility for her that kinda grew over time, and some degree of amusement.   For her?   I don’t know.   I can only guess that I made one facet of life a little less worrisome for her…  beyond that, what she might have felt about me is anyone’s guess.

Wanda didn’t talk all that much.