Category: Ridesharing Confessional

Sometimes when I’m driving in Philadelphia, it can be difficult to find a customer, especially during rush hour when there are thousands of people on the sidewalks and impatient cars behind you. It’s a busy place, and that’s part of what makes driving there enjoyable, but it can also be challenging.

Driving at night, the contrast is striking. Sometimes, when the weather is bad, there might not be anyone on that very same street that, just a few hours before, was heaving with people. I can drive a ten-block stretch without seeing another human. It’s a strange feeling, at night, in a city that large, when you feel like you’re the only person there.

* * * * *

So, anyway, I got this call on Friday night and it was bitterly cold and snow flurries came and went through the street lights. I got a call in one of the university districts, but there was only one problem. The person had called for an Uber when they were in the middle of the building, so her ping was in the center of the block on my screen, making it hard to know where to pick her up. I circled once, then parked up and called her.

We had trouble orienting each other to our own surroundings, but eventually I found her. The wind kicked up and rushed into the car when she crawled into the back seat. She was only going a few minutes away. We apologized to each other for the hassle. She had an accent, but I couldn’t place it, so I asked her where she was from.

“Iran,” she said quickly, as if she didn’t want to dwell on it.

“Wow,” I said. “Can you go home from college during breaks, with the situation being what it is?”

“I can’t risk it,” she said quietly. “If I leave, I might not be able to come back in. I have one year left, so I’m almost finished.”

“Wow,” I said again, thinking of how I’d feel if one of my kids was in college, stranded in another country. “Do you miss your family?”

“Very much.”

We talked about what she was studying, how she liked the city. And then, in a blink, we were at her stop.

“Well,” I said, “I, for one, am very glad you are here, in our country.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. And for a moment I thought that was the last thing she was going to say. But it wasn’t.

“It doesn’t usually feel that way,” she said, again in a quiet voice. Then she climbed out into the cold and walked through the dark to her apartment.

The African-American grandmother climbs into the front seat of my car, propping her cane between her legs. She has a tube delivering oxygen, and the tube runs across her upper lip, but I cannot see what it is connected to. Her three granddaughters climb into the back, and they are like polite little parrots, their cute voices repeating each other.

“Good evening, girls,” I say, smiling.

“Hello,” one says.

“Hello,” the second one says.

“Hello,” the third one says.

“What are you girls up to tonight?”

“We had a play at school,” one of them says.

“It was fun,” another says.

“It was about black history month,” the third says.

“Wow! Awesome!” I pull away from the school.

“These girls are strong and brave,” the grandmother says. Then, she turns and faces them. “And you all did a wonderful job tonight.”

I begin driving around the block in order to head in the other direction.

“It’s taking you out around,” the grandmother proclaims in a deadpan voice, part disgust, part resignation. “These devices.” And she shakes her head.

“I know,” I say. “It really doesn’t like telling me to make U-turns.”

We both laugh.

“I think making a U-turn is exhilarating,” she whispers, and we both laugh again. Who is this inner city grandmother, this fast driver?

We chat for the duration of the ten-minute ride. She’s a no-nonsense woman, and I can tell these granddaughters of hers are in good hands.

“Did you grow up here?” I ask.

“Grew up in south Philadelphia. Now I live in southwest. Been here my whole life.”

“I’ll bet you’ve got a lot of stories to tell,” I say.

“Oh, you wouldn’t even know the half,” and she nods thoughtfully, and she is lost inside her head, lost inside all those memories.

We arrive at the house and they get out.

“Thank you,” says the first girl as she leaves the car.

“Thank you,” says the second girl.

“Thank you,” says the third girl.

They are young, but they carry themselves with poise and dignity. They are polite, but I realize they are not robots. They follow their grandmother through the dark, through the late-night Philadelphia streets, and I wish every child in that city, every child in our world for that matter, had someone like that grandmother to follow. Physically she is tiny, and she walks with a cane, and she needs oxygen to breathe, but it’s easy to see she’s a warrior. Nothing more plain to see than that.

It is 10pm on a Friday night in southwest Philadelphia. The streets there are pockmarked with holes and cracks and sections that have crumbled in on themselves. The sidewalks look like someone pushed them together, a strewn deck of cards, some leaning up, others down. To the left of the street is a line of mostly-boarded-up row homes. To the right is a school, or what used to be a school – I can’t tell. An eight-foot chain link fence surrounds the building and neglected grounds. The streetlights mounted on the corner of the building only serve to accentuate the shadows.

A man with long dreadlocks comes towards the car, carrying a stroller, followed by two tiny little girls. They are like ducklings, waddling slowly along behind him. I get out and we manage to cram the folded stroller into my tiny trunk. He gets in the back seat with his girls and buckles them in. They fall asleep in moments, each tightly holding a stuffed animal.

“Did you grow up in Philly?” I ask him as we drive a winding path from one place to another. I try to avoid the bumps, try to give the little girls a smooth ride.

“Nah,” he says, and I can tell in the single syllable he isn’t impressed with his new city. “Jersey. But I got these two girls now, and their mom lives here, so I’ve made the move.” He changes tone quickly. “When you make this turn, get over into the wrong lane, if you can. There’s a nasty pothole.”

I take his suggestion, looking for the offending hole in the road, but what I see is more like a trench. An entire section of road is missing, six feet wide, three feet across, and at least eight inches deep.

“Thanks, man,” I say. “I don’t know if this car would have made it out of there.”

He makes a disgruntled sound. “Yeah. You’d think with this soda tax, they’d come through on fixing the roads like they said. But nothing changes. No one cares about this part of the city.”

We pull onto a very narrow street. I have a small car and can barely fit between the vehicles parked on one side and the sidewalk on the other. Someone is parked in the middle of the street, lights on. A group of guys hang out around the car, shooting the breeze, and when I pull up no one so much as moves. We sit there for three or four minutes, and the guy I’m driving becomes animated.

“What the hell is wrong with people,” he mutters, then shouts. “Get the hell out of the road!”

They don’t hear him. I’m glad. I don’t have any particular desire to be in between that group of young men and the one in my backseat. We sit there for at least seven or eight minutes. The night is dark. The men glance at us every so often. One of them gets in the car and puts it in gear, but another guy comes up and leans on his car window, and they talk for a few more minutes before pulling ahead.

“There’s even a f***ing parking space. Right up there. People these days,” the guy in my backseat mutters to himself. We pull up to his house. I get out and help him with the stroller.

“Thanks, man,” he says. “Have a good night.”

He wakes his girls, pulling them from the back seat. They are limp with sleep. They moan in protest. They walk like zombies from the car to the sidewalk and up the steps. I see my own kids there, in the night, the way they don’t even wake up completely. I imagine them under blankets, sleeping until morning.

The sun will come up in the morning, I think to myself. I’m sure this street will look better in the morning. I’m sure it will look like a place tiny little girls should be living.

But I drive away, unconvinced.

“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.

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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.