.01) Taxi Memories

The taxi driver ferried passengers in the clunky station wagon anywhere they sent him, bright sun or depth of night— an old, woman needing safe passage to the market and back home; a prostitute enroute to work on 'the stroll' downtown; Pentacostal preachers arriving at the airport for a conclave. an old Vet who fainted in the lobby and had to be carried upstairs to his wife; the young man visiting the orphanage where he'd been raised, going to get the money and skipping out on his fare. Sometimes the 'passenger' was a box of chilled blood on dry ice, urgently bound for a hospital patient's veins. You never knew where the next fare would take you. Sometimes he companioned the white moon all night, other nights had to go it alone through frigid, moonless skies as thick, white smoke from factory chimneys ascended the city like prayers. The mystic radio's 3 AM crackling could bring a voice from the night that sent him gliding silent streets to transport a lonely soul. He knew the city like he knew his own soul, every passenger a version of himself. Sometimes he felt an uncanny sense: he was not just a tiny point on the grid, but the whole Mandala, at once. Every afternoon at rush hour, the bottom fell out of the world. Workers raced madly to empty downtown as traffic cops blew whistles, waving their frantic arms. It took more than red lights and police to counter entropy's force there on the downtown streets. The hand that directed the traffic had to be Providence itself. He watched the city and the world survive miraculously, one more day— and every day, it happened again! After a time he moved on to other adventures, but a green Checker taxi will always be cruising the streets of his heart, just as there will always be such ferrymen in the world— as long as there are cities, as long as there is night.