Cabbies and Life & Death

In honor of my dearest cuz, Hans.

There are words that I want to hold onto. Maybe they are gradually becoming what I hold onto because I don’t have the people I want to hold onto in my life anymore. Or is it just the passage of time, aging and the end of an era?

Like the word cabbie. I love the sound of the word and how it feels rolling off my tongue. I grew up in New York and in the city, if you wanted to get somewhere you just grabbed a cabbie. Grabbing a cabbie or “hailing a cabbie” used to be done by standing on the side of the street and putting your arm straight up with a slight wave as the sea of yellow cabs rushed by. Some yellow cabs were full or only had one person and others had their cream colored lights lit on the roof of the cab with black letters that read: Off Duty.

Today, I used an app on my iphone to schedule a ride. It’s amazingly easy, but it lacks the adventure of the hunt for a cab. It used to be an intensely competitive hunt in some parts of the city. Midtown and the garment district come to mind. It could be quite cutthroat. There are a million different attitudes seen by people in New York hailing a cab.

I was recently on my way to Boston for my cousin Hans’s wake and funeral. Hans was my only first cousin. He was ten years older than me and more like an older brother. I had two cabbie rides that brought back the joy of conversation with cabbies and temporarily distracted me from my grief. The first was the cab ride to LaGuardia with a 40 year old Latino man in a baseball cap and sunglasses who grew up in Harlem. He pointed out how much he loved the beauty of the view of the New York skyline from the BQE, he talked about the painful situation with the war between HAMAS and Israel in Gaza which he said was a land grab from the Palestinians and finally his experience as a teenager on 9/11.

The other was a cabbie I got from Logan airport to my hotel in Boston. He was a soft spoken Ethiopian man who had been in Boston for 10 years. He had come to Boston to study science and had to drive a cabbie part-time to make ends meet, something he found to be very difficult because he felt it shouldn’t be necessary for him. We shared experiences of living in countries that weren’t our country of origin and what that was like. I spoke of developing a new sense of who I was as an American while I lived in Rome, Italy and he spoke of his experience in the US. He raved about how in Boston most people were educated and open, and how he had many opportunities for growth and education that he just didn’t have in Ethiopia. He had friends in Texas and talked about their experiences and difficulties with racism. He clearly and without hesitation said that it’s because they are simple in rural parts of Texas, farmers and ranchers who are ignorant since they have no exposure to the great variety of people and so they are fearful because it’s unknown to them. “I don’t blame them, if you’re not exposed and educated how can you be any different?”

By the end of the ride we both felt connected and he turned around in his seat and looked at me. I thanked him and said I enjoyed talking with him and he did too, then we shook hands. It felt like the natural next step would have been to talk more over tea. It seemed we both didn’t want the ride to end. I felt his desire to be seen as the scientist that he was rather than just a guy behind a wheel, a cabbie.

Being a New Yorker I grew up knowing that cabbie rides were always a potential adventure in getting to talk to men from all over the world and the occasional woman. When I was very young in the 1970’s most cab drivers were New Yorkers, born and bred. Gradually cabbies became people from around the world.

I’m reminded of a cab ride I had late one night from my ex-wife’s apartment in Brooklyn. He was from Tibet and had been in the US for only a year or so. We spoke of his difficult experience of adjusting between these two worlds. He deeply missed his country. He was a refugee which is a very different experience than coming to the US to go to college. He talked about the “greed” of China and how people are actually not very evolved and that’s why the Chinese government is so cruel.

On the plane ride from LaGuardia to Logan the flight was scheduled to take an hour and twenty minutes, the pilot announced as we took off that we would arrive in Boston in thirty minutes. The cabbie ride, as per my app on my iphone, said the trip from Logan to the hotel would take 45 minutes which was longer than the plane ride, that seemed like a strange time warp.

The distance between here and there, whether it’s across Boston or Brooklyn or across the states of living and dying is so much more profound when you are open and share the journey. The distance between us is an illusion. Death is an illusion. Hans is here, in my heart, accessible and always will be.