Taxi driver

We had come from an appointment in the interior, which took up  most part of the evening.  Seeing that we had no ride, a friend offered to ferry us to where we could find public transportation without difficulty. At a mall, where we got down, a taxi approached us, and, fearing that we might not get another one, we rushed inside it. But when I saw the driver, I thought of pulling my daughter out of the taxi and looking for another ride. Because a man in his seventies sat on the driver’s seat, and I feared for our safety. Did he have good eyesight and good reflexes?  What about his heart?  Did he have a busy bladder, and would he need to empty it every three hundred meters?

But we decided to give him a try. He had, aside from a youthful smile, almost the quickness of hand and sharpness of eye of a Formula One driver, and perhaps a better continence than me. And he sang, belting out the vigorous, unmelodious songs of the young, paying to them the homage of a robust, off-key voice.

It goes without saying that my daughter and I enjoyed the ride.  Sort of.  First, he asked us a question: who told the most lies, the men or the women? This we did not answer (I, in deference to my daughter, and she, perhaps in deference to her father). Finding us quiet, he laughed and gave us his answer — the men. I only half-agreed with him.

I asked him why he still drove despite his age. The need to live, he said. Although his ten children had finished school, already they had families of their own and they could not support him. Besides, he added, a self-imposed regimen — diet of fish and vegetables and daily cycling — had kept him in good shape, but, he added, not in that department.

I knew what he meant, and thought of a word that might describe his condition, which sounded like importance.

This provided him with a cue for launching into his raunchy stories — those that taxi drivers love to tell with savage humor. I really should have stopped him because of the presence of my daughter, but I checked myself, afraid that I might seem strait-laced. Besides, the girl, a young lawyer, must have acquired enough social and moral savvy to deal with off-color tales.

I reflected on my live-and-let-live attitude and concluded that the Gospels did not advise this. For instance, Matthew writes that Jesus had said, “If your brother does something wrong, go and have it out with him alone, between your two selves. If he listens to you, you have won back your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you: the evidence of two or three witnesses is required to sustain any charge. But if he refuses to listen to these, report it to the community; and if he refuses to listen to the community, treat him like a pagan or a tax collector.”

Of course, the idea that we form one community underlies this course of action, which means that my request for the taxi driver to stop his monologue about genitals really amounts to a concern, not just for myself and my daughter, whose mental environment had then to fight to keep itself free of polluting images, but also for the driver himself, who at upwards of seventy seemed not to have outgrown his adolescence — a matter harmful to his human development if not to his soul.

When we reached home, and my daughter and I gathered our things before leaving the taxi, the driver, who had become strangely quiet, suddenly muttered in a voice soft and avuncular, “In the end, the most important thing is prayer.”

I found this a surprise. In the end, the wisdom of his years took over, and jokingly I replied, “Happy to hear that, especially after your vivid accounts of motel sins.” We both laughed at this, which I took to mean that ultimately we had won back each other.