I was sitting in a taxi, the meter had just clicked to $50 when he landed. Traffic was terrible because of new bridge construction. People like to slow down and look at the progress being made. Like me, I don’t think anyone has any idea what CalTrans is actually doing with the bridge. Every week or so they close the bridge at night, and the next day there has been this huge shift in the rubble. It’s definitely something to slow down and squint at, scratch your head and wonder what exactly they’re thinking.
I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes. One thing I know about construction is that for all the hassle, traffic, and noise while it’s happening, the moment it’s done no one can imagine it ever having been any differently. It will be, if they ever finish this bridge, as if it were always like this.
When I got in the taxi I asked the driver if we could do a drive by pickup. He wanted to know what exactly that meant, and I explained that we were going to the detestable Oakland airport to pick up my six year old son and his two bags. The driver balked and said “No, no… this is illegal. I will not do this.” I smiled at him and said ok. But he thought about it. He made some calls and shouted into his bluetooth headset in Russian and asked me questions like “You are passenger, yes?” as if I were in on the conversation with him. I half expected him to put the whole thing on speaker phone so that I could join in the Baltic fun of negotiating the potential liabilities of breaking the law, or if this business of a passenger asking the driver to pick up someone from the drop off area at the airport was technically illegal at all. Between text messages with my son’s mother reporting on the traffic’s progress, the driver and I continued to discuss the possibility of his making more than $100 for his last fare of the day, his urgent need to return to the garage, the inevitability of all three of us needing to go back to San Francisco (together or separately,) and whether or not I thought we could get away with it. I think it was the practicality of all three of us needing to get back to San Francisco that finally allowed him to slap his forehead, grin at me in the rear view mirror and say “You know what? I do it. We try. Ok?” I just grinned at him and said “Whatever you think is best baby.”
He told me he didn’t care. He actually said it “I don’t care.” But then when we arrived at the airport, the first thing he did was remove his bluetooth headset, hold it out the window to show the traffic officer (who actually looked at the little silver device curiously and took a few steps toward the cab,) and shout “I am going to pick up in passenger drop off!” While I thought the shiny headset as bait for the fuzz was a great trick, I realized then and there that this guy wasn’t going to be on my team if I ever decided to do a bank job. I could see him, sweaty and confused out in front of the bank dangling his bluetooth accessories and shouting “We are robbing the bank! We are robbing the bank!” to anyone who would listen. Certainly off that team.
The traffic cop rolled her eyes and waved us through. I laughed, the driver stopped, looked at me as if to say “Why are you laughing?” and then began waving his headset up and down faster and trying to look back at the cop. He wanted to shout again, but the cop blew her whistle and waved us on.
We arrived in slow motion. There was my son, I could see him before he saw me. He was standing up straight, looking into all the cars for me. His little mouth was in the shape of an o and his eyes were wide and hopeful. I swung open the door of the taxi and ran across the road to pick him up and spin him around and around. I love his voice when he shouts “Daddy!” and nuzzles his face into my neck. Heaven.
Time stops when I am in my son’s arms. His smell, his face, all the things he has to show me and tell me. There’s nothing in the world but us. I asked him to say goodbye to his mother and give her a kiss, flung his bags into the trunk, and we piled into the taxi. In our haste to get out of there I forgot his passport for the return trip, and didn’t give his mother the check I had made sure to write out and put into an envelope and bring with me. Nothing happened as planned, but there we were bundled into each other’s arms in the back seat of the taxi, already out of the airport and heading onto the freeway back to San Francisco.
On the ride back my son looked up at me curiously. His lips pursed, eyes wide open as if he were going to ask me a technical question about Hegel’s theory of the modern state, perhaps searching for delicate words in which to explain how I might have missed something in the dissertation he’d been reviewing for me. I smiled at his bright face, and he reached up and removed my sunglasses and looked into my eyes.
* tears *
Before I could pull myself together he put my sunglasses on his own face, and leaned back in the cab and said “I like being with you Daddy.”
* more tears *
“I like being with you too son.”
We rode the rest of the way home in silence, reclined in our seats just watching the city we love best appear in the distance, and blossom up around us. When we arrived at our apartment, we hopped out as if we’d made a quick dash across town and were annoyed that it ended up taking so long. I paid the driver his $120 and he smiled at me with big huge eyes. I imagined he was still wondering how he ever managed to swing this last fare of the day without ending up in handcuffs. He wiped his palms off on his trousers and extended one of them to me. We shook. I was half expecting him to give me a complimentary bluetooth headset, but he didn’t. Instead he looked at me as he’d been rehearsing this for some time, thoughtfully looking at my son, and then up to meet my eyes and said “Cool kid.”
We both looked at my son.
“Yes he is.”