Folk Wisdom

Last week I took two cab rides. Usually I like talking to cab drivers, but for both of the rides I was looking forward to sitting quietly in the back on the super-squishy cab seats that you know are filthy and watching the scenery. Scenery-watching is something one gets to do very little of in this city. We're all steering something usually. I wonder if fewer drivers and more passengers, just as state of travel, would change how we look at the city and make the city feel different. Most of the shapes that make up this city are very ugly; it's the crannies and the pockets where you find the beauty.

Anyway, both cab drivers were from Armenia and they cracked open the door of conversation with the thin wedge of one question.

The first cabbie asked me if I drank coffee (it was 7am). I said no, and the verbal heavens opened. He talked long about the evils of caffeine and at barely an interjection from me, jumped quickly into the topic of how to eat foods properly (no liquids with your meals and fruit only on an empty stomach) which is an easy slide into the medical industry. It was amazing how much mileage he got from my responses. I probably put forward thoughts and responses at the rate of one every five minutes. I would say he was quite happy to keep talking except for how generally disgruntled his tone was throughout.

The second cabbie asked me why I got my car repaired so far away from my house, which is a question I was asking myself at the time. That took us through old cars, foreign cars, to being foreign. This seemed to be the nucleus of his conversational mojo. We took some brief detours through the cabbie strike at city hall (they didn't want to have to wear uniforms) but mostly we stayed on the main route of leaving Armenia in 1992 and coming to America. The best part about this story was his immigration story: After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was not longer almost impossible to leave the country, but the US subsequently made it much more difficult to emigrate in. The old reasons to flee didn't hold water anymore so when he pleaded his case, he did it on the basis that he was a communist and he was persecuted in his homeland by people who hated communism (having recently escaped it). And it worked and he got in.

That part of the story made up for the loss of two quiet car rides looking out the window.