Eleven ten. I’ve had two quarts of Snapple tea and I really don’t know how to characterize my day today. This whole week has been rather strange. The silences and the blind futurities are intense, sort of like a story by Hemingway I read long ago. At noon my taxi is coming to pick me up and whisk me away to Laurel Hill for a DDA meeting. Part of me would rather stay home and make the world go away somehow. But every exchange with people is an opportunity to assert myself and prove my courage. It is a way to validate my being, to affirm it and feel good about myself. The worst that could happen is I walk out on Laurel Hill; and actually, that could turn out to be the best thing I ever did… The sparrows have made a nest in an old dilapidated birdhouse on my back patio, so I see and hear them all the time. I think to myself that I’d love to go home, wherever that is, but possibly there is no home for a person who stays sober; no comfort zone, no sense of security. I read in an Iris Murdoch novel that no one is ever secure, which at the time I couldn’t accept. But today I’m closer to acknowledging this truism as being true indeed.
Two forty. My cab driver was quite late to pick me up from home, and I feared I would be very tardy for the meeting. So I got in the backseat feeling rushed and impatient with the cabbie’s lackadaisical attitude, until I presently relaxed and accepted what would happen. As it developed, I arrived right on time and Misty was late.
Now, in writing this, I suddenly remember the cabbie from another taxi ride I took a few years ago. She was totally lost up on the campus and I had to guide her to the drugstore on 18th Street and from there to Chambers and onward to my home. It was a dark rainy night in December, her second day on the job, and she had no working gps to steer by. To start with, she didn’t know how to get from the hospital to Hiron’s, and somehow we wound up on Franklin Boulevard heading east. So I told her to make a right turn on Agate Street and pursue it to 18th. The funny thing was that we were in the middle of the university campus and had to wait for a great number of students to cross at a few intersections, especially at 13th and Agate. There were three of us in the taxi including the driver. I don’t recall how long it took me to get home that night, but it was a memorable experience. And I really felt sorry for the poor cabbie; glad to see she’s doing better now.
robgradens 