Dorsai - Taxi

Both of them also made a point of telling me how much they'd enjoyed not only the time we'd spent together at my place, but simply getting to know me. They also said that after listening to what I had to say, and what I thought about things, they also had a different perspective; that they were learning that there were different ways of handling life than the ones they'd always used before.

I wrote back, and told them (separately, even to using two different types of paper) that it was nice to hear from them, and that I was glad that things were working out so well for them. I said that I was happy to have met them, too, and that it was good to hear that I'd been able to help as much as I had. I closed out by telling each of them that I would always remember her with fondness.

I never heard from them again, but I don't have any doubt that their lives after that were happy, and full; mine certainly was from having met them.

I was majoring in Philosophy in college when I realized that the majority of the "modern" stuff they were trying to teach me was basically just bullshit.

The thing was that I still had an interest (even passion) for philosophy and how to use it to solve problems in the Real World. So I chucked the whole thing and decided to find a career that would let me meet people and try to use philosophy (in the classical sense) to help them.

I finally settled on driving a cab instead of becoming a barber or cop or bartender or anything else that would let me meet a variety of people. Along the way, I've been able to do what I could to help people the way I wanted to, and had some pretty unique experiences. Some of them came as a direct result of my driving a cab, while others only peripherally involved my profession. Then there were those occasions where my job simply provided the opportunity for something else…

I was in line at the airport after getting one of my regular fares out there for his flight to some business conference, and idly speculating about some of the people in the line for cabs when I saw a woman exit the terminal and take her place at the end. Dressed in a lightweight blouse, and skirt that stopped a few inches short of her knees, she was far enough away that I couldn't make out the details of her face; but even from where I sat I thought she looked pretty damn good: blond hair pulled back into a pony tail that hung to about the middle of her back, slightly buxom, slender waist and trim hips, a compact little ass, and a pair of legs that went from 'here' to 'there' REAL well. When I got close to the head of the line, it started looking like the rig behind me was going to get her as a fare, but what I'd thought were two separate people turned out to be together – meaning that I won the jackpot, as far as I was concerned, when I reached the head of the line the same time she did.

I hustled out of my cab and did my usual helpful-and-friendly schtick, and got a chance to look at her a little closer – and was glad I did: looking to be maybe in her middle twenties, she was an absolute knockout: light pink complexion, ice-blue eyes, straight slender nose, and slightly full red lips. I also discovered that if she was wearing a bra, it had to be the lightest and thinnest model on the planet; I didn't have any doubts about where her nipples were. All in all, she looked like the prototype for your classic California Blond.

Once I'd opened the door to my rig for her, and handed her inside, it was behind the wheel for me. In the relative confines of my cab, I could detect the soft pleasant scent of her perfume and started debating whether I should ask her to marry me before or after I found out what her name was. But my mouth took care of business for me by asking her where she was headed, and much to my surprise, she gave me the name of one of the cheapest decent hotels in town. The place she was going to had the basic hotel stuff covered, like room service and the like, but didn't have much to offer beyond that: no concierge, no laundry, no conference rooms, or any of that. Even their BEST room would barely qualify as acceptable in the high-end places. But it was decent, and most of all, cheap – and did a fair amount of trade with the businessmen-on-a-budget crowd.

Telling her I knew right where it was, I got us out of the airport, and started on the longish drive back into town. I'm a damn good driver, in part because I'm always watching what's going on around me; not just looking at the couple of vehicles in front of me, but even farther. So I noticed when the spacing between the vehicles up ahead got smaller and smaller as they gradually slowed down – and finally came to almost a complete halt. I tried to ease my way over to the righthand lane as soon as I saw what was happening, but didn't get very far when a group of big trucks got in the way. That left us in the middle of a four lane parking lot just a few minutes later. My fare could see what was happening, of course, and was listening closely when I switched on the radio I keep in my rig for when I expect to be sitting for a while. I dialed in an all-news station, and it didn't take but a couple of minutes for them to report that there had been a big accident up ahead… a good ten miles ahead of us, in fact. I let dispatch know where I was and what was happening, so they could try to warn as many other drivers as possible to avoid the mess.

I asked my fare if she needed or wanted to get word to her hotel that she wasn't going to be there quite when she'd expected, and she decided that it would probably be a good idea. After getting her name (Peggy Davies), I asked dispatch to call her hotel and let them know she'd be late. They said they would, which she heard. She thanked me, and I told her that it wasn't a problem and that I was glad to do it.

After we'd listened to the radio station go through their news cycle and get back to the accident ahead of us, I asked her if there was anything she wanted to listen to. She said she didn't, so I just turned it off.

With nothing else to do, the two of us started making conversation with each other; I learned that she was in town to make sales presentations to a couple of stores for the line of womens wear that she worked for. I also learned that she was single, twenty-eight, and didn't have any regular guy at home because she spent so little of her time there due to the fact that she was the most junior of the salespeople. After a little questioning from her, I had to explain how I'd ended up driving a cab after dropping out of college; that I'd done so deliberately simply baffled her. But it didn't stop us from continuing to chat about different things, and discover that we got along pretty well. When the meter in my cab hit what the normal fare to her hotel would be, I stopped it. She saw what I did, and thanked me after admitting that she was limited by the company on what she could claim for business expenses. She also gratefully accepted the coffee I offered her from my thermos.

It took a good nearly an hour before we could go anywhere at all; then another fourty-five for us to move more than fifty feet. But once traffic started moving, it didn't take all that long until I had us moving along at the stately pace of five miles an hour. Even though my focus was on my driving, it didn't demand enough of my attention to keep me from maintaining the conversation with Peggy (as she'd insisted I call her). It was coming up on three hours after she'd gotten into my rig when I finally pulled up in front of her hotel. She was relieved to learn that the cab company had called as promised, and that they'd held a room for her, even though it was past their usual deadline. I helped get her luggage inside, and up to her room (the place didn't have anything like bellboys, either); once I'd set her couple of suitcases on the floor, she dug into her purse and pulled out enough money to cover the fare – and a fairly nice tip. After handing me the money, she said "That's not the way I would have wanted to spend the last couple of hours, but if it had to happen, I'm glad I was in your cab."