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“Aw, man,” the young man says, practically jumping into the car. “I love these cars! I’ve always wanted to ride in one.”

“Thanks,” I say, smiling. “How’s your day going?”

The people back home where I grew up would be tempted to look at this kid in his sagging jeans, basketball jersey, and straight-brimmed ball cap and label him “thug.” I know, because not too long ago I would have been tempted to do the same. But only a few minutes into our conversation, and I can easily see how wrong we all would have been.

“I’m finishing up culinary school,” he says matter-of-factly, as if that is nothing special, as if I should have expected such things of him. “My girlfriend is starting her own bakery. That’s why I’m heading up there tonight. To celebrate. I’m not a fan of late nights, but she was all over me.”

This launches him into a long monologue about the nature of relationships.

“She wants me to move in with her!” he says, shaking his head. “I’m too young for that. She sends me pictures of wedding dresses!” This last one is said with complete disbelief. “Wedding dresses!”

He laughs and laughs and laughs, as if I am the one telling the stories and he can’t believe what he’s hearing.

“Man, I need alone time. I’m not ready for a wedding. What do you think I should do?”

I smile. “I’ve been married for 17 years,” I say. “I made that decision so long ago, I can’t even remember. You’re going to have make this call on your own.”

He laughs again. We arrive on his street and I pull up to the sidewalk.

“Oh, man,” he hisses at me before laughing again. He is loud and joyous and we have been friends for decades. “There she is! She’s waving at me from the door. From the door! What should I do about this, man?”

I laugh with him and shake my head, unwilling to put my oar in. He shakes his head in disbelief again, goes to close the door, then peeks his head back in and says it one more time, in an urgent kind of whisper.

“Wedding dresses, man! She’s sending me pictures of wedding dresses!”

Then, he slams the door and walks towards the porch light. I can hear him laughing to himself.

My first novel comes out this fall! You can find out more and preorder it HERE.

Driving into Philadelphia the traditional way – floating in on the highway and getting placed into center city with its glass and its architecture and its business people in suits – is the only way I had ever gone into Philadelphia. I would head in for sporting events or specific restaurants or a holiday visit to see the arts performed. Most cities are good at this. Most cities have a way of ushering you in with all the other traffic, showing you the best sides of themselves, in and out, and the worst you see is a flood of brake lights from time to time..

Ridesharing will give you a truer view of the city.

Yes, I take college students to see the 76ers. Yes, I drive wealthy couples down Chestnut Street to the regular lineup of bars and restaurants. Yes, I drive expensive suits from shimmering office fronts all the way south to the airport.

But the side of Philly I had never seen before was this: There are potholes in the north and the southwest sides of the city that would swallow my car. There are sections of rundown homes, eroding brick and boarded up doors, that stretch on and on, so many that it is hard to comprehend. There is mile after mile of decay and disuse and crumbling things.

And in the midst of all of it are beautiful people, people who love their children and their communities, people who want many of the same things I want. People doing the best with what they’ve received: the tired mother and son going from a back alley science center to a home in southwest pinned between two abandoned row homes, plywood covering the doors and windows. A principal trying to mentor assistant principles in some of the most under-served parts of the city. A grandmother and three of her grandchildren heading home from a scintillating middle school performance of black history, arriving on an entirely unlit street, the shadows overflowing with vulgar shouts and rustling movement.

There is beauty beneath the surface, because that is where the people are.

So, come around this week for stories from Philadelphia.

On the way to pick up a Lyft fare, I heard a DJ on the radio congratulate someone for winning a “snow-filled day of fun” at a local ski slope. It is February, but, unfortunately for the winner, it is also supposed to be close to 70 degrees for most of this week. Probably not what any of them had in mind.

The passenger I picked up was actually someone I had driven before, and on our last trip we realized we attend the same church. It was nice catching up again. I asked him how he was doing. And what he said caught my attention.

About two years ago, he’d had a really rough go of it. A major life change. A real transition. And then the ensuing two years since had been jam-packed with busy-ness, nonstop doing doing doing. Then, last month, with the start of this new year, things suddenly slowed down, one of those screeching halt kind of slow-downs where you feel like you’re coming up for air. And he realized that he had never grieved properly for the things he had lost two years ago, he had never walked the winding paths through his sadness. Somehow, the busy-ness had led him another direction. But there he was, right in the middle of all of it. These are my words, not his, but you get the idea.

I wonder how often we do this, how often we miss out on the grieving or the celebrating we need to do because we are so busy busy busy doing doing doing and on we go to the next thing and the next until life becomes this unending stream of stimuli, our brains so muddled with the excess that when we’re suddenly sad over something that happened two years ago we give ourselves a hard time and a good, stern, talking-to.

My friend, though, he is a smart man because he said he is sitting with it, and, yes, some think he’s depressed and others think he should snap out of it but he is relying on close friends and family to walk with him through this thing that happened so long ago.

Then we were there. We arrived at the discount grocery and he got out and that was that.

“Thank you,” he said.

People will often forget to thank you for various things, but in my experience as a driver one thing people will almost always thank you for is listening.

When you drive people from here to there, and when they sit in your back seat, it’s easy for them to forget you’re there. I suppose it makes sense, since a lot of people never even make eye contact with me. They get in the back and I half turn and say hello and their voice hits me in the side of the head and I turn and look at my phone to see where they want to go. So, I’m just half-a-head to them, at best, or an ear, and they’re a voice, at best, or the moving blur of a being, and we go from there, various pieces of various humans hurtling through the air.

But a strange thing happens: when you drive people from here to there, and they forget you’re doing the driving, you’ll hear all sorts of things. Mostly things that will break your heart. You’ll hear wives talk to representatives at domestic abuse shelters, trying to make arrangements for a night or two, that’s all, just a night or two. You’ll hear these same women talk to CYS and wonder why they can’t get their kids back from the kids’ dad, and they’ll talk about how they lost their car, or how they had to pick up their child early from school because they didn’t know if Dad was going to show up and then she’d never see her again, and that little child will be right there in the back seat, and you’ll wonder how it feels to be seven, in a strange car, while Mama goes on and on, explaining why your old man is a piece of shit.

Those are their words, not yours.

When you drive people from here to there, you’ll catch a glimpse of their eyes in the rearview, eyes staring out the window at nothing in particular, or maybe at the sun breaking through a late January day, or maybe at the traffic going in the other direction, always going, car after car after car, and you’ll wonder if that’s where she wants to be headed. Anywhere but where you’re taking her.

And then, when you’re finished driving these people from here to there, after you pull into the decrepit parking lot of an old apartment complex, and you make your winding way through the brick buildings, and you pull up to stop, she’ll shield the phone from her voice and she’ll say thank you. And there will be something about the way she says thank you that makes you realize she knew you were there, she knew, and she didn’t want you to hear it all, but she also didn’t mind you heard because no one listens anymore and she is thankful you were okay listening to all of it, even indirectly, even if it was only aimed at the back of your head, or one of your ears.

You’ll realize people are more than the pieces you can see, more than faces or eyes or slumped shoulders. They are made up of good days and really, really bad days and months and years and a thousand miles. They’re phone calls and disappointments and, even then, they’re sometimes still hope, too. Hope that’s been shattered and then swept up into a pile and gathered together and, for some unknown reason, kept from the dustbin. People are all kinds of crazy things, and the craziest of these is hope.