BOOKS LIKE THE LAST TAXI RIDE DRIVERS

“Just a minute,” answered a frail and elderly voice. Would I not want a driver to do the same if my mother or father had called for a cab? It might, I reasoned, be someone who needs my assistance.

Unless a situation had a real whiff of danger, I always went to the door to find the passenger. Too many bad possibilities awaited a driver who went up to a darkened building at 2:30 in the morning.īut I had seen too many people trapped in a life of poverty who depended on the cab as their only means of transportation.

BOOKS LIKE THE LAST TAXI RIDE DRIVERS

Under these circumstances, many drivers would just honk once or twice, wait a short minute, then drive away. When I arrived at the address, the building was dark except for a single light in a ground-floor window. I assumed I was being sent to pick up some partiers, or someone who had just had a fight with a lover, or someone going off to an early shift at some factory for the industrial part of town. I was responding to a call from a small brick fourplex in a quiet part of town. And none of those lives touched me more than that of a woman I picked up late on a warm August night. I encountered people whose lives amazed me, ennobled me, made me laugh and made me weep. We were like strangers on a train, the passengers and I, hurtling through the night, revealing intimacies we would never have dreamed of sharing during the brighter light of day. Passengers would climb in, sit behind me in total anonymity and tell me of their lives. Because I drove the night shift, my cab became a rolling confessional. What I didn’t count on when I took the job was that it was also a ministry.

It was a cowboy’s life, a gambler’s life, a life for someone who wanted no boss, constant movement and the thrill of a dice roll every time a new passenger got into the cab. There was a time in my life twenty years ago when I was driving a cab for a living.

Books like the last taxi ride