How Jaded We Can Get!
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Hi, again, folks! Interesting how chipper I feel about writing one more post about the taxi driving experience. And it will be just this one more. Life causes us to be and do things we sometimes don’t see how we became candidates for. When I was having the experience I became more and more healthy and adapted quite well for some time and is often the case as I go through life, I felt for a time I was the perfect match for it.
In fact, I began to expand my ideas and had lots more I would like to have done with it, had I had a few other necessaries in place. Those lacking, I turned my attention back to more the person I see myself evolving towards. That is a whole other story so let me mention some of the highlights for me of driving a taxi, share a couple of unusual stories and then I’ll get back more in the groove that fits today.
I don’t know how many of you have any idea what kidney dialysis is like. I had never really thought about it and nearly everyone I asked had the same response I did. The first time I picked someone up after having completed another (for them) session I nearly dissipated into a puddle (I was thinking of the melting of the witch in the Wizard of Oz). I cannot imagine an actor being good enough to fully be able to take on the person of someone who had just been through that and exude how exhausted they were. It literally seemed to pour through her skin.
She was clearly an attractive woman, and talking with her gave all the evidence in the world that she loved life. She was eager to communicate, so I asked her (wanting to say, wtf#@*) what had brought on the need for the dialysis. I don’t remember her well educated answer, I just remember thinking, “wo, whoa there, so I maybe can’t avoid this by all the avenues I’d thought!” It was one of those experiences I think all of us occasionally has where we cannot say, TYG, enough.
As I look back now, I realize that I drove an unseemly number of people to and from dialysis. Crazy enough (I thought) I drove a couple, both of them going through the draining experience, and then back home to be wiped out for many hours after.
On at least two occasions I picked up a young, vibrant, full of expression and abilities, girl, at four in the morning to take to her session. I don’t remember for sure how early in her life, I just know the majority of her young life, dialysis commanded the greater number of hours in her week.
Nearly everyone I drove, to what seemed to be the worst imaginable experience I could think to take a taxi to, had a truly exemplary attitude. I salute every one of them and continue to wish them well.
I want to lighten the mood just a bit and share how much I enjoyed discovering so many new home subdivisions in the entire area of the Valley of the Sun. I never get over the thrill of seeing new homes, new house plans, new to the Valley builder styles, new communities.
I had sold new homes, as well as one other time had a real estate license before leaving for ten years. It seemed utterly endless, the opening of new subdivisions, and I was as convinced as everyone I heard talk about it that there would never be a buyer’s market in the Valley.
What a shock, after arising off my “bleak and dreary” bed saga, to find some of my customer’s remarking on some of the massive homes in the southeast area of the Valley sitting empty with all their furniture left in them. The furniture was too large for the next (downsized) stage home, apparently. Sad, too, to see homes never purchased, never lived in, some in subdivisions closed before any sales could be completed.
Driving primarily south and east, but free to drive anywhere I chose, I felt I did catch up on some of the things that had transpired in my absence. I had to laugh to think how no one had requested my permission to keep moving on while I barely thought about anything continuing to progress here without me. How truly dispensable we all are!
I mentioned a story or two. I learned things about and from men I’d never personally expected to, and had a blast doing it.
I pulled up in the parking lot of some high end apartments in Scottsdale in the wee hours one morning and saw two attractive twenty-something individuals, one male, one female. The tension between them was palpable through my windshield but after a few extended minutes there was a brief hug, possibly the most perfunctory of pecks on the lips and then the young man pulled open the rear door and flung himself in.
With barely time for his buttocks to meet the back seat, he exclaimed, “I should be having sex with that girl, right now!” Not one to ordinarily skip a beat and determined to not miss anything good now, despite my shock at how my prayer to be able to not fall asleep with an overlong shift had been answered, I boldly responded, “Well, then, why on earth, aren’t you?”
“A friend of hers, who lives back East and is gay (a guy), is flung across her bed, asleep.”
Lesson for me: today’s youth have peculiar restraints. (Or, else they lack for floors, table, sofas, imagination or might one have less desire than the other?)
Whatever else was up, I too was up and listening to a male (this was the shock to me) who was “spilling” whatever was in his brain, at the moment. I had the time of my life!
Last story, there are hundreds, some I’d have to card you for – boy, are those good!
I tried to imagine me and my cab (sweet girl) Lilliputian size, while we (and what seemed like millions of others) struggled to wend our way down the single lane either side and with cars jammed up along the sidewalks of Tempe on a weekend night.
Not completely out of the intersection at one of the busiest corners, before I knew it, I had a female in my back seat. She appeared for all the world a female but so packed with energy and aggressive heat, I kept glancing back (and not just through my rear view mirror).
I was far too curious to be cautious, I realized, for she seemed to be dressed in an exaggerated fashion like a little girl but with the framed bosom more fitting a giantess.
I’d never been this close to such caricature and our environs frankly seemed a bit tame.
She seemed to be playing games with me about where she wanted to go, or I was too naive to recognize the passwords. Anyway, with my innate friendliness and her piecemeal suggestions I managed to get her some forty miles into Phoenix.
I suggested she might call me should she find herself without a ride at the end of the night. I had finally managed to pry out of her she would be participating in some kind of a play. All well and good but it didn’t appear to be any kind of a playhouse to me.
Suffice it to say, that between two and three the next morning, I felt I had entered some world not in any of the immense number of books I had visited in my life, would never have recognized her without help, and determined to look up fetish as many times as it would take to gain a glimmer of competence in grasping nuances more quickly.
Life is, at very minimum a kick in the pants, is it not? And as good as we make it!
I still want to be great, love sharing with you, and will blog again soon. anacarin