Oct 22 2006
Roses and a Rosary
Today is Sunday. I didn’t go to church.
Today is Sunday, and I saw a rosary, heard a story of redemption, and had a Jesus Strap to cling to if I needed one.
I took a cab.
The car reeked of roses and I could barely smell the pine scent from the tree-shaped air fresheners inserted into the vinyl on either side of me. The cab had one of those heavy dividers, the kind that fully separates the driver from the passenger.
I hadn’t seen a divider like it since I’d been in New York City. In fact, I wondered if the cab was a refurbished NYC Yellow Cab as the heavy divider had a “Made By Taxi House Corp, Bronx, NY” decal on it. I could see bright yellow paint peeking out along the door joint – it didn’t match the white exterior or the dull navy interior.
There was a “Jesus Strap” suspended on each side and I thought I would need it the way the driver forced his way through the merge and then roared onto the freeway. I thought perhaps both the car and the driver were New York City imports.
I asked the driver, a Nigerian man around my age, if he had lived in New York. He immediately made the connection and responded with “Oh, you mean by the way I drive?” I laughed a bit at that, but then questioned him about the car. The car seemed old – the divider’s plastic window was frosty with age, the metal parts rusty and there was even an ashtray in each door. I didn’t think they made modern cars with door ashtrays.
He said that the car wasn’t that old at all, it was built in 2001 and well, passengers were hard on it. I mentioned that such dividers were required in Boston cabs and he knew all about that. He had gone to school in Boston, getting a degree in business and marketing. Unfortunately, his business didn’t make it and here he was, driving a cab.
He said that cab driving was dangerous and that just a week ago, a cab driver was shot and killed by a passenger he had picked up from the airport. He knew the other driver and had been a car or so ahead of the driver in the taxi line the day it happened. My driver could have been the one who had picked up the shooter.
I said I was surprised that a driver was killed by a passenger picked up at the airport; I would think that picking up someone downtown would be more dangerous.
My driver said that it’s always dangerous – you just never know. He was once nearly robbed. He said that he wasn’t because he preached to his potential robber. As he said this, he fingered the rosary dangling from the rear view mirror. He continued to finger the rosary as he recounted how he talked the young man out of robbing him. He said that God was with him. God and luck.
Today I heard a story told through a divider while a rosary was fingered and the scent of roses infused the air.