Category: Ridesharing Confessional

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.

I picked the girl up on a gray day in January, much warmer than usual, the perfect day for Jose Gonzalez’s music and leaving the windows down a few inches. The sun started to break up the clouds.

“I’m sorry, did I keep you waiting?” she asked as she got into the car.

“No, not at all,” I say. I always say that, although in this case it was true.

Her destination was the Harrisburg Area Community College, Lancaster campus. Ten minutes away. We drove towards the eastern edge of the city.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

“About four years,” she said.

“And where were you before that?”

“I’m from South Korea,” she said. “I’m Korean.”

“Do you like it here?”

“It’s nice, yes. I like it. But I don’t think of it as a city. I’m from Seoul.”

“Wow,” I said. “What brought you all the way here?”

“Getting my education. I like it here. I hope I can stay, but if not, that’s okay.”

The sun is warm through the windshield. I can’t believe it’s January.

“Do you know other South Koreans here in Lancaster?”

“Oh, no,” she said, laughing. “There aren’t very many of us. I know a lot of Japanese. But not many Koreans.”

“I drive a lot of Chinese students over at F&M,” I said. “I think there are three or four hundred of them there.”

“The Chinese are everywhere!” she said, laughing again. It’s interesting to think how different we are, how far apart we grew up.

“When you live in Seoul, I mean, I don’t know the geography well, are you close to North Korea? Do you worry about that?”

“Yes, we’re close,” she said, shrugging, “but all that happened before I was born. I don’t think about it too much, except when they launch missiles.”

We pull into the college.

“First or second building?”

“Second.”

She paused.

“You know, North Koreans are always fleeing to the South, to escape their government. I don’t know how they do it. And when they get to the south, they try to pretend they’ve always been there. The discrimination against North Koreans can be bad. It’s sad, really. We’re all the same. Same island.”

I pull up to her building.

“Really,” she said. “It’s very stupid and sad.”

She said it as if she had only just realized they were the same.

I woke up thinking I could really use a sunny day, what with all the craziness in the world and the lack of sleep due to an overabundance of small children in the house, but the bright white lines between the shades fooled me. I opened them to find a very bright yet cloudy sky. No luck.

I drove a couple who whispered to each other the entire ride, and a young business man whose hair was exquisitely in place, not a single strand rebelling. The sky was still gray, with a spitting rain and wind that chased trash cans down city streets.

I picked a girl up behind the gym, at a small tattoo parlor. She came out nursing her arm, as if it was broken. She told me she is joining the Marines, or at least that’s the plan, so she has to have a tattoo removed from her forearm and wrist.

“That doesn’t sound pleasant,” I said.

“It’s not,” she said, wincing. “It won’t stop burning.”

She told me when her brother joined the Marines, he had a large tattoo that wasn’t in a place you are allowed to have tattoos as a Marine, but he removed it himself. With lemon (or lime, I can’t remember) and salt.

“If you rub it hard enough,” she said, “it comes off.”

I winced. She shrugged.

“Now he has a huge scar there. But no ink.”

I dropped her off in the city, and again it looked like the sun might come out. There were touches of blue along the horizon, above the buildings.

I picked up a girl from where she worked just outside the city. She was kind and had lots of piercings. The sun had not come out.

“Do you like your job?” I asked her.

“I don’t hate it,” she said, and then she laughed this joyous laugh, as if she knew she was the craziest person on the planet and didn’t care in the least. That laugh! I realized that if we listen to people laugh, we can find a touch of sunshine there. It’s not exactly like the real thing, but on days like these, with boiling clouds gathering at the horizon, with far away sheets of rain falling on distant fields, it will have to do.

These gray, January days give me a quiet sense of missing things, especially in the city, where the rain makes all the light run in watercolor shades and the shadows pull down the sun. I drove the regular lot last Friday night: a girl going home from work; a kid picking up his keys at Pizza Hut and talking to me about whether or not he can get into med school; a girl who left her car somewhere the night before after she drank too much, and we’re out looking for it.

I turned off the ridesharing app and swung by my house in time for dinner. I parked along the sidewalk on James Street and looked at our two large windows, lamplight glowing through the still-opened shades. Kids everywhere. Honestly, everywhere. Setting the table, running back and forth to the dining room. This is a house I am very happy to come home to.

We eat dinner. The older kids set up their traditional Friday night sleepover in the living room while I put Leo to bed. He’s very demanding in his song choices: “Good Night, Sweetheart” must be followed by the theme song for “Super Why” followed by Laurie Berkner’s “Moon, Moon, Moon.” I end it by singing that great dirge of death, “There is a river, we must cross over.”

I rocked Poppy Lynne but have no luck. Maile took over. I was back out on the streets for the Friday night shift.

Because I know the family late-night routine so well, because I know the quiet that falls in the house by 11pm, I had a sense as I drove around that the world was asleep.

I drove two couples home at the end of the night, all four of them doctors, or at least in the medical profession. They were at a work party. The four of them talked candidly to each other about the people they spent their evening with. This is always a strange thing, when the people in the car talk as if you are not there. I prefer it that way, but I’m still getting used to it.

They were rather ruthless in their assessments.

I pulled over to drop them off. The man gave me a $10 tip on a $15 fare. I thanked him. I headed back to the city. I thought about Leo, sleeping in his bed, mouth wide open. I thought of Poppy and the way her cold makes her breathing sound when she’s asleep. It’s 1am, and the night has only begun.