time machine

Sometimes, I feel that I am driving a kind of time machine. 

On one ride, I pick up a recent nursing school graduate. She’s just gotten a job she wanted at a clinic. Moreover, she got several thousand dollars to sign the contract, which she’ll use to take a short trip to Thailand before she starts the job. She’s brimming with energy and confidence. Ever since she was little, she has wanted to help people. She thought about becoming a doctor, but in the end, she felt nurses help more people more concretely. 

After I drop her at home, I wind up at one of the nearby hospital complexes, picking up a nurse getting off her shift. This woman, maybe forty years old, slumps against the window. She’s been a nurse for nearly twenty years. And every year, things have gotten worse. Of course, the pandemic was hell. But even before and definitely after, they just keep asking for more and paying less. She has thirty patients. Thirty patients. It’s impossible. She wonders aloud: “What the fuck have I done with my life?”

On a different day, I pick up a young Latino from a local Air Force base. It seems his basic training has just finished, and he’s heading home to Springfield for a couple of weeks before he ships out to his first assignment. It was tough, yeah, but he feels it’s already doing great things for him. He feels more in control of himself, stronger, and not just physically. He’s not sure where he’ll go. He’s signed a contract—I forget for how long—and he’s excited about the training in electronics he’ll receive. Figures instead of paying for a college degree, he’ll get paid to get one. 

And then, not on the same day, but on any number of other days, I take physically and mentally devastated veterans to and from appointments at the VA hospital, to or from methadone clinics, to or from homeless shelters. When I’ve asked how they wound up in the service, they all have a story similar to the young man I drove from the local air force base that day. Not one of them says I signed up expecting to kill children abroad, or to become disabled, or addicted to opioids, or to be in prison, or homeless.

Or a young teenager, eyes glassy with love, carefully straps the car seat of a gurgling infant into my car. Then, a few rides later, the baby is replaced by an adult who describes the challenges of being raised by teenage parents. 

The first page of a book hops in, and then, a little later, the last page appears, concluding a story of a once-promising past now lost in a labyrinth of dead ends and wrong turns. 

A dream gets into my car, and then, after it gets out, bobbing with hope and possibility, regret, laden with despair, fills the empty seat the dream left behind. 

And sometimes, the time machine switches directions: failure rides for a few minutes, haggard and exhausted, before giving way to accomplishment, blooming with strength and pride.

Then I remember the time machine is an illusion. These are not pasts or futures I drive.            

 I drive only presents. And, however cramped, each present is an opening to a future that cannot be foretold.

---