Though I describe him as lean, he said that when he goes
back to Italy his cousins call him “Fatty.”
“America is the land of the free and the obese,” he told me,
turning to face me. I laughed nervously, amused and wanting to be friendly but
also wanting him to look at the traffic in front of him. “It’s not the sugar,”
he said, turning briefly to glance at the traffic in front of us before turning
back to me. “It’s the salt. People say they love fresh orange juice, but it’s
full of salt. ‘If you want fresh juice,’ I say to them, ‘you have to squeeze it
yourself.’ Don’t get it from a can. Too much salt. The ADA started in 1972
under President Nixon. It’s B.S. Now we’re even more obese. Fifty pounds more
even though the ADA started because of obesity. 1972. B.S. America is obese in
every way.”
He turned back to the road, and I relaxed, both because he
was facing the road and I wasn’t trying to interpret his accent through his
disability any more. The traffic wasn’t moving, so he turned again to face me.
“Traffic,” he said. “How long have you lived in Seattle.”
“Twenty-four years. Since 1991.”
He glanced briefly at the road, the cars still not moving,
and said, “Then you’ve seen changes. Me, 1993. I used to know everyone in this
town. I was the only cab driver who would go to your neighborhood then. No one
else would go there. Too many guns. Too many knives. But everyone knew me.”
“Today, the traffic is because of the president of China. (He
then said some things that I couldn’t decipher.) The Chinese government keeps
American money. When Americans spend money in China, the businessman has to
give it to the Chinese government for Chinese money. The government devalues
the American dollar and collects American money for, say, five years. Then they
raise the value and sell it back for more money. B.S. I wonder if the president
and his wife are eating in the International District. Probably not. Brought
their own chef. They have money. It’s B.S. What’s the address again?”
Somehow, my economist taxi-driver knew that the traffic
ahead had moved, so he looked forward and drove to the next stoplight, braked,
and turned around.
The light changed, the traffic opened, and he finally turned
to face front and drive, turning back from time to time to toss his words over
his shoulder at me. “We will have another warm winter,” he told me. “People say
it’s CO2. Al Gore. B.S. The world was made from CO2. People make CO2 when they
go to the bathroom two, three times. You know what I mean. A hole in the
atmosphere. B.S. The earth is warming because the core is cooling and the heat
escapes and goes into our atmosphere. That’s where the CO2 comes from. Not
cars. A person makes more CO2 than a car. Al Gore. B.S. What’s the address
again?”
“I was on a research project in Ecuador in 1967. We learned
that. I was seventeen, making $35 an hour. That was a lot of money then. B.S.
America is obese in every way. The land of the free and the obese. What’s the
address again?”
I love talking with taxi-drivers, though I didn’t say much
to get this one going. I didn’t say much to get the guy who drove me home going
either.
I had to wait a ridiculous 45 minutes for this driver, but
he turned out to be worth the wait. He was friendly, and helped me and my
backpack into his cab. He wore jeans and a green baseball cap, and I wondered
what it would be like to have a job where I wore a baseball cap.
He apologized for being late and explained that he’d gotten
the call on upper Queen Anne. Something wrong with the computer. It was a
pretty day, and I didn’t have to be anywhere soon, so I didn’t mind. I was glad
this driver didn’t turn around to look me in the eye when he talked to me.
We headed down the road but stopped because a workman
holding a stop sign indicated we should. As a crane entered the street to work
on a giant new apartment building, I said that I was amazed by how much
construction there is in the city now.
He took off his green baseball cap to scratch the bald spot
in the back of his head and said, “We need rent control in this city. My
daughter’s rent just went up, so she bought a condo and pays about the same as
she would have paid in rent. In New York, our family lived in a rent-stabilized
apartment. Nice. They have rent control in New York for people whose families
have been in the same place for generations, but rent stabilization is what
they have now. Rent can go up 3% a year and there’s a court devoted to disputes
with apartment owners. Big court. Giant. That’s fair. That’s what we need in
Seattle. Nobody has rent control anymore. So do you work, or what do you do?”
“I worked in schools for 27 years,” I told him. “I loved it,
but I got sick and had to leave that work. Now I’m at the University of
Washington working on a Masters in Social Work.”
“Theodore Roethke taught at the University of Washington,”
he told me. “He was a great teacher. Roethke said he couldn’t have been a poet
without having been a teacher. He said everyone could write poetry. Great guy.
You heard of him?”
“I have,” I told him. I didn’t mention that I quote
Roethke’s poem, “I Wake to Sleep and Take my Waking Slow,” every morning.
“Great guy. One of his students died during a break when she
was riding a horse. She lived on Beacon Hill. He wrote a poem for the funeral,
“Elegy for Jane.” He read it there and gave her parents the original before he
left. Nice guy. I won’t bore you with my analysis.”
I taught poetry in high schools for years and now I run a
poetry club for seniors in an assisted living facility. I even have a poetry
exchange at the bottom of our stairs at home. Of course I wanted to hear his
analysis! I didn’t tell him about my background, but I did tell him I’d love to
hear his analysis
Instead, he quoted the poem’s beginning:
I remember the neckcurls, limp
and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong
pickerel smile;
And how, once started into talk,
the light syllables leaped for her.
And she balanced in the delight
of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the
wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and
small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers
turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the
bleached valleys under the rose.
“Good guy, Roethke,” my taxi-driver said somewhat wistfully.
He pronounced the poet’s name with a hard “t” as if the “h” weren’t there, so I
told him I’d always pronounced the “th.”
“No, he said it like ‘Rudke.’ He was a friend of my father’s.
Great guy. He had a lot of friends. Big guy with teeny legs. He was friends
with Dylan Thomas, too. They spent two days walking around New York together.
Burly guys. They were not effetes. That must have been some great bullshit.
Thomas always wanted Roethke to go salmon fishing in Wales, and Roethke wanted
Thomas to go salmon fishing in the Northwest.
“My family reads “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” every
Christmas. You heard of Dylan Thomas?”
I said I had, and he quoted from Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill.”
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was
green,
The
night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden
in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the
apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and
leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down
the rivers of the windfall light.
As he finished quoting, he said, “There’s more. That’s not
all of it. Which house is yours?”
I asked him to circle the roundabout and leave me off at my
sidewalk, easier that way with my disabilities. As he helped me out of the car,
he noticed the poetry box at the bottom of our stairs and whisked around with
gusto to say, almost to shout, “What’s this? A poetry box? Are you a poet?”
He had been quoting enthusiastically from two of the English
language’s most-loved poets. I have published one poem (unless you count the
poem in my high school’s literary magazine.)
I said, “Yes” and bid him a good day. I was already having a
good day, and it was still morning.
