a day (# 181)

Buckle up.

Day Number 181: 21 rides. 11 hours. 217 miles. 

I didn’t mean for it to be that way. It just seemed to happen, the way that life just happens. Or at least certain stretches of life. You look back at them and think, how did that stretch turn out that way? 

On this particular day, I know I was—literally—in the driver’s seat: making choices to accept or decline rides, turning the wheel, stepping on the gas, hitting the brakes. And yet, somehow, the day seemed to grow a will of its own so that by the end of it, the day had driven me.

Day Number 181 was a Friday. My goal for the weekend was to complete twenty rides by Sunday to snag the unusually generous Uber Quest bonus of $115. On average, twenty rides would take me around ten hours to complete, excluding breaks. I like to have Sundays off, so I planned to try for eight rides on Friday afternoon and then complete the remaining twelve on Saturday.

• 11:11 AM, Easthampton, Massachusetts. 0 miles driven. 0 rides completed. 20 rides to go.

I set out towards Amherst, home to the University of Massachusetts’ flagship campus, Amherst College, and Hampshire College, and isn’t far from Smith College in Northampton. So, on a Friday when school is in session, Amherst is a good bet for piling up short rides.

• 1:48 PM, Northampton, Massachusetts. 43.9 miles driven. 7 rides completed. 13 rides to go. 

I spend a couple of quick hours zipping students from campus to work or dorms to class. Milo is a unicorn, and I’m driving on a rainbow. I’ve already completed seven rides, an average of 3.5 per hour. At this pace, I can do the 13 remaining rides in four more hours tops. After all, demand only picks up on Friday afternoons as the UMass students start pregaming at bars and house parties. I could finish this whole weekend’s quest by 5. Okay, maybe not 5. But maybe 5:30. Okay, or 6, if I’m unlucky. But still, I’d be done. I’d have not only Sunday but Saturday off! 

To reward myself for my productivity and to stoke my motivation, I make a pitstop, put gas in the car, hit the bathroom, and grab a coffee. I get another short ride in Amherst.

• 2:30 PM. Amherst, Massachusetts. 47.5 miles driven. 8 rides completed. 12 rides to go. 

My ride rate declined because of the break, but even so, I’m on track to finish by 6:45, and I know my next passenger, Donald, a graduate student studying sports analytics at UMass. The last time I drove him was a ten-minute ride to the laundromat. 

Not today.

Today, Donald’s going to Springfield, 26.6 miles away. While counting my unhatched chickens with buoyant excitement, I failed to follow the most elementary rule of Uber Questing: check the expected duration of an incoming request before accepting it. 

That may be as good a metaphor as any of how, in life, I lose my way, stumble, and fall. Sailing impatiently forward on a treacherous cloud of willful optimism fueled by motivated reason backed by an inadequately small sample of poorly processed data, I confidently but inadvertently stride down the wrong trail toward somewhere I never intended or wanted to be.

A dark cloud drifts into the car and settles momentarily on my mind, blocking my view of Donald. I try to shake it off, cheerfully confirming the destination but secretly hoping he’d put in the wrong address: “So we’re going to Springfield today?” 

He confirms. There is no mistake. 

Amor fati: Latin for “love of fate.” Going back twenty-five years to when I used to teach Friedrich Nietzsche’s book The Gay Science in my literature class, “Reading to Live,” I have been stirred by the notion. Here is Nietzsche: “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things—I will be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. . . . I want to be only a Yes-sayer.”

I double-down. I, too, want only to be a Yes-sayer. I, too, want to be one of those who make things beautiful. 

“That’s great,” I say. “I love driving in Springfield. It’s great for me to get out of the bubble of the college town. And maybe good for you, too.” I ask questions, remembering that the last time I drove him, he was getting set to begin his first semester as a graduate teaching assistant. I listen, or I try to. We discuss the impossible time demands that graduate teaching places on graduate students. I sympathize, elaborating on the economic and pedagogical injustice of that system. 

Donald is open about his experience and politely responsive to my opinions. But mostly, he seems resigned to the conditions of his workplace. He seemed feistier the first time I drove him. Maybe two months of business school have already made “exploitation” a dirty word for him or, worse, incomprehensible gibberish. 

I don’t even consider that Donald simply may also want to be a lover of his fate, a Yes-sayer.

• 3:20 PM. Springfield, Massachusetts. 87.6 miles driven. 9 rides completed. 11 rides to go.

By the time I drop him, I’m deflated. I am in Springfield, where the distance and duration of rides become more unpredictable. The car feels heavy, but it doesn’t occur to me to just call it a day and finish up on Saturday, as I usually do, as I’d planned to do. Instead, I numbly follow the GPS to Taco Bell.

Tiana gets in. She’s holding the phone to her ear but pulls it away to confirm that she’s Tiana. She nods and smiles when I point to the candy box and the poems. Before I’m out of the lot, she’s off the phone and apologizes. 

“It’s all good, Tiana,” I say. “No worries. How’s your day going today?

Not so good, she tells me. She just found out two days ago that she lost her job and, with it, her health benefits. She has a two-year-old, and she’s five months pregnant. She was on the phone with MassHealth. She’s hoping to use her aunt’s address in Springfield to get on one of their plans. 

It turns out she works in Atlanta. She was a grief counselor for those who have lost loved ones to substance abuse. She lost her mother, stepfather, and grandmother. She lives with her boyfriend, who’s looking after their little girl while she’s up here visiting her aunt. But he doesn’t know yet that she lost her job. She’s afraid to tell him since she’s pregnant and what are they going to do? 

I stop calculating; memories move through my body: the gut punch of suddenly losing my job, the queasy poisonous seep of a secret breaking loose, the ponderous dread of the imminent, inescapable judgment, the weighty load of shameful remorse. 

I tell her that sounds hard. I tell her I’ve lost jobs, too, and I know how scary it can feel to be staring into that unknown. I say this might seem weird, but I think there is a poem in the box that might speak to her situation. Tiana glances down, then selects a small laminated poem resting on its edge against a corner of the box, just peeking out.

“Oh.” She says softly. “Oh. Yes.” 

“What’d you get?” She holds up the tiny card. I love this. I love it when my riders read me the poems they choose. Most of them, like Tiana, appear to be unaccustomed to reading aloud, let alone reading poetry. The occasion seems to prompt a kind of attentive, formal gravity in them. For me, looking in the mirror, whatever the age of the passenger, I see a child gathering herself to read aloud in class: treating the occasion with respect, treating the words with respect, treating herself with respect. 

Tiana reads:

      “Barn’s burned down —

      Now —

      I can see the moon.”

“Ha! Yes! That’s the one I was thinking of for you. Amazing!”

“Really? No way! Incredible.”

Emboldened by Providence, I ask her if I can share something from my experience. She nods, of course. I tell her I used to be a college professor, that I did it from age 25 until age 54. I tell her that I lost that job suddenly and unexpectedly and lost the ability to work in that field again—the only field I’d ever worked in. I tell her I was initially indignant, angry, bitter, and terrified. I tell her I fought against it, even as door after door closed on me. 

“Finally,” I say, “I just broke. I just surrendered. It sound kind of corny now, but I felt it with all my heart at the time. I said to God, ‘I give up. I do not want to fight you anymore. Please make me stop fighting. Please just let me be on your side.’ It wasn’t automatic. There were still lots of challenges. There were still many backward steps on my part, last-minute flailings, and lashings out and grasping. But from that day, I began to feel relief, trust, and optimism.”

“Now,” I continue, “if someone had told me back then that I’d be driving strangers for a tiny fraction of what I made as a professor, I don’t even think I could’ve imagined doing it, let alone happily. But I am. And it’s not the driving in itself. It’s that being ejected from my old life and stripped of my old habits forced me to recreate my life from the ground up, including only those things that felt healthy and pure and nourishing to me. I’d always wanted to be a creative writer, but thirty years ago, I was too scared to do it. But once I’d lost everything, well, I had nothing left to lose, so I began doing it. And now, between this job, creative writing, and honest relationships, I am happier than I ever have been in my life. None of this would ever have happened if it had been left up to me if my life hadn’t burned down.”

Barn’s burned down —

Now

I can see the moon.

 Amor fati.

Tiana’s been listening, rapt. 

“So, Tiana,” I say, “Seems like no more substance abuse grief counseling. This is presumptuous of me, I know, but could it be that you are being invited, like cosmically, to move on from that, from dedicating your life to the death and grief caused by substance abuse? That barn’s burned down. What moon can you see? Is there anything you’ve secretly always wanted to do?”

“I just got chills when you asked me that,” she said, suddenly leaning forward. “I always wanted to do lashes. I’ve done it for friends for years, and everybody loves it. I would love to do that!”

“Lashes? That’s awesome. I’ve driven quite a few passengers who seem to make a good living doing that kind of thing right out of their homes. Seems like the only challenge is building up the client base.”

“I know. And how do I live while trying to make that happen?”

“Right. I don’t know. That’s a good question and one you’ll need to answer, of course. But maybe, I don’t know, that’s something you can talk about with your boyfriend, something y’all can try to figure out as a family. Do you think he would understand you wanting to try something like that?”

“Oh, for sure! He’s always supportive. But this is a lot.”

“Well, it depends on how you put it. It might be a lot if you were like, ‘Yo, I lost my job, and I want you to support me for an indefinite period while I pursue my dream of building a lash business.’” Tiana laughs.

“But it might not seem like so much if you said, ‘I know this timing is not good. And I’m kinda scared. But I have this feeling that maybe I have an opportunity to do something new with my life, something I love doing, something I could even do from home, which is great with two little kids. Do you think you could help me figure out how to make this dream a reality?’ I mean, obviously, I don’t know him or y’all’s situation at all. But to me, something like that doesn’t sound like a lot. It sounds more like an invitation than a demand, you know?”

“Yes, yes. For sure. I know he’ll be great. I’m excited to talk to him about it now. This ride totally changed my day. Thank you so much.” We are pulling into the driveway of her house.

“Thank you so much, Tiana, for sharing your story. This ride changed my day, too. It’s always great to have a chance to remember all I have to be grateful for. Thank you.”

• 5:00 PM. Springfield, Massachusetts. 113 miles driven. 13 rides completed. 7 rides to go. 

I won’t be done by 6 or even 7, and I am getting hungry. 

I press on, navigating to pick up Jeremiah at the Springfield International Charter School. I remember this place. Not long before, I’d driven a Chinese math instructor to work there. On that ride, he’d told me that I could make $5,000 a month teaching English in China with my background. I remember wondering why such a lucrative prospect didn’t interest me and then thinking, I guess I like my life the way it is—like I told Tiana.

I pull up in front of the school. Kids are milling about; most of them look like athletes who’ve just finished practice. Uber now tells me this ride was reserved and that I’m a few minutes early. It tells me I will get paid for my time. (This is true. I will get paid something like a dime a minute.) Several kids stand in front of the doors, checking their phones. 

A couple of minutes pass. I send a text through the Uber app: “Hi Jeremiah, It’s Santiago, your driver. I’m out in front of the school whenever you’re ready. But I’m early, so no rush.” I add a smiley face and a thumbs up. 

One boy wearing football pants and a tee shirt keeps looking down at his phone and then up at my car. After a few more minutes, I step out of the car and call him.

“Jeremiah?”

“What?”

“I’m an Uber driver looking for someone named Jeremiah.”

“Jeremiah? He’s in the locker room, I think. You want me to text him?”

“Sure, that’d be great. Just let him know I’m here. No rush. Thanks!”

“Cool,” he says. But then, before he texts, a little herd of boys pours through the doors, and he’s engulfed in high-fives, fist-bumps, bro-hugs, and laughter. I watch. He never texts.

I check the app. The timer has shifted from counting down to the pickup time the rider reserved to counting up to the time when I can cancel the ride without being penalized. I’ve got a few minutes to go. The crowds of kids are thinning out. I realize Jeremiah probably got a ride with someone else and forgot to cancel the ride. The second the clock ticks up to five minutes, I cancel. I will get paid about $3 for my time. The no-show does not count toward my quest.

• 5:16 pm. Springfield, Massachusetts. 116 miles driven. 13 rides completed. 7 rides to go. 

I’m getting hungrier, but I’m still imagining if I press through, I’ll be home for a late dinner—maybe by 9.

It takes almost 15 minutes to get to Angela at an out-of-the-way suburban nursing home. I pull into the long driveway that snakes through the wooded lot and onto the circular entranceway, curling to a stop by the front door. Looks like a nice place. A minute or two ticks by. I can see the blue dot representing her cell phone moving around inside the building. 

Then I get a text: “Be right out!” I know this text. It is only ever sent by people who will not be right out. It is part of the game some riders play. This means: “I’m running late, and I don’t want you to cancel the ride and leave, but instead of just saying that and asking you nicely not to leave, I will pretend I’ll just be a minute.” And what this means to me is: “You are a puppet in my private show, and I will control you.” I text back a simple “thank you.” 

Several minutes pass, and her blue dot keeps jumping around the map. I want to cancel. I could cancel. But then I’m still at 13 rides; I’m in the middle of nowhere and will need to start ride number 14 all over again. I wait. Another text: “Coming.” This one I do not answer. I just watch as the blue dot meanders casually further from the entrance. 

Finally, Angela bursts out of the building, stomping toward the car. She flings open the back door, hurls several tote bags into the back seat, and thrusts an enormous container filled with a milky coffee-like drink toward me: “Can you hold this?” Speechless, I see my hand extend toward hers. I hold her drink. She swings her legs into the car, slams the door shut, and takes her drink back. 

“I am so done,” she huffs.

“Sounds like a rough day,” I say. 

“I’m not kidding. I’ve fucking had it.” 

“I’m sorry. What’s going on?” I don’t feel like asking. I don’t want to hear about her day. But I ask anyway. Why do I do that? As we make our way out of the property, Angela begins to answer my question. But I am distracted. It appears we are making a stop before her final destination. It is in Connecticut, forty minutes away from everything that matters to me. I want to confirm this. She pauses her complaints to tell me that, yes, we have to go across the border into Connecticut to get cigarettes. 

“Wait,” I say, “I’m confused. Cigarettes are legal in Massachusetts.”

“Not menthol,” she says.

“Wow. I didn’t know. How inconvenient for you.”

“Tell me about it.” For the next 46 minutes, Angela tells me about it, complaining about: 1) the ban on menthol cigarettes in Massachusetts; 2) the price of menthol cigarettes in Connecticut; 3) her subordinates at the nursing home where she is the chef; 4) her superiors at the nursing home; 5) her patients at the nursing home; 6) her dead mother; 7) her father; 8) her father’s girlfriend; 9) her sister; 10) the cost of used cars; 11) her last employer; 12) the employer before that; 13) her landlord; and 14) Springfield. 

Angela seems to want to live in a universe with nothing else but her and menthol cigarettes. By the time I drop her off I get it: I too would like her to live in a universe of her own, or at least a different one than me. But even then, I wonder with shame how I have let the loving wonder and connection I’d experienced with Tiana evaporate. Why couldn’t I have extended the same empathy to Angela? Why did I have to get uptight about my ride count? If I’d engaged her more actively, I might have improved her day and buoyed myself for the rest of the evening. 

• 6:18 pm. Springfield, Massachusetts. 136.4 miles driven. 14 rides completed. 6 rides to go. 

Here I am, forty-five minutes from home, hungry, dazed, and depleted. But also grimly determined to complete the quest. I simply can’t contemplate heading back out tomorrow for six more rides. I take a snack break, log back in, accept a ride, and set off on a short trip to pick up Robin.

I pick him up in a low rise project. He puts his laundry in the trunk and gets in the backseat. Fortified by my snack of white cheddar Cheez-Its and a bottled Dunkin’ Frappuccino, I introduce myself and tell him there was a phone charger in front of him, and a box with candy and poems on the seat next to him.

“Alright, Santiago,” he said, “this is quite a setup. You’ve got everything.” Inwardly jubilant, I answer modestly.

“Not everything, but just a few things to make the ride more comfortable.” Robin takes a poem and sighs softly. I see him shake his head inside his dark hoodie.

“Everything okay, Robin?”

“Yeah. Just this poem. It’s like it was written for me.” 

“Oh? What’s it say?” Robin does not hesitate before he begins to read.

“Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.” It’s a fragment of a poem, “Everything is Waiting for You,” by the Welsh poet David Whyte. Robin continues. “Someone was just saying this to me today.”

“Is it true?” I ask.

“I do have a hard time trusting people,” he replies. 

“I can understand that. That’s not easy for anyone. And sometimes it’s nice and even good to be alone.”

“Yeah, but I think I push people away too much.” Then Robin begins to tell me about how he came up here to Springfield from Florida to help look after his grandma before she passed away. And now he’s just still here, kind of floating, working at Dunkin’ when what he really loves is to cut hair. That’s when it hits me.

“Ohh! Wait! You’re not Robin, are you? You’re Justin! I drove you before!” He leans forward to see better in the car’s dark interior.

“Yessss! I remember” 

“Why’d you put Robin on the app?”

“I don’t know.” He laughs to himself. “Maybe I guess it’s what I was just saying. Like I don’t want anyone to know me.”

“But Justin, dude, you do realize that you are opening up right now on this ride, right? And to an almost total stranger?” 

“Yeah, but you’re easy to talk to.”

“Maybe because I’m a stranger?” I venture. “So there’s nothing at stake?”

“Right, maybe. Right.”

“I get that. I think a lot of people feel that way in the car. It often makes me wonder if there was a way we could lower the stakes in all our relationships so that we could be more open with each other. But somehow, that seems hard to do. It’s like as soon we make a nice connection, we start to pile all this shit on top of it: expectations, wishes, fears, doubts.”

“Yes, totally.” Justin and I don’t solve this one before we get to his place a few minutes away. But when I meet him at the back of the car to open the hatch so he can get his laundry, we spontaneously clasp hands and hug each other.

“I’m really glad I saw you tonight, Justin. I needed a friendly ride, and you gave me more than I could have hoped for. Thanks, man. Hope to see you again.”

“Right on, Santiago. You too. Be safe.”

• 8:23 PM. Springfield, Massachusetts. 158.1 miles driven. 18 rides completed. 2 rides to go. 

When I get to the next pickup address, it’s an elementary school. That seems weird to me. But I figure it must be a teacher working late. I wait outside what might be the right entrance. But it’s pitch black inside and outside, and I have no idea. The blue dot seems to be at the opposite end of the building from me. Wait, no, now it’s outside. 

Hazard lights flashing, I start backing up alongside the building toward what looks like the playground, but I’m not sure because I’ve got my eyes glued to the screen, trying to move the little arrow that is me closer to the blue dot that is Calvin. Shit, now the blue dot has just leaped in a way that I’m pretty sure is physically impossible unless Calvin is a kangaroo or an alien. 

I get a text: “Is that you?” 

“Yes,” I say. But I don’t see anyone. I wait. The blue dot has disappeared from my screen when suddenly my back door swings open and a person dressed entirely in black and wearing a ski mask, from which the glowing ember of a lit cigarette dangles, leans in. 

“Uber for Calvin?” The mouth asks. 

“Um. Yes.” I say. Calvin tosses the cigarette and gets in the car.

“Glad I found you,” I say, thinking that it’s more like heroic that I found him. By now, he’s stripped off the ski mask. He could be a teacher, but he’s pretty young. “Seemed strange to be picking someone up at an elementary school on a Friday night.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Anyway, I’m Santiago. There’s a phone charger in front of you and some snacks and poems in the box next to you. Where are we headed tonight, Calvin?”

“Windsor.” I look at the phone screen for the first time since Calvin got in the car. Incredible. This ride. The second to last ride I need to do. This ride will take me thirty minutes south, almost an hour from where I live. It’s so improbable that, given the strangeness of the day and my altered state, I’m not even vexed. Rather, I am convinced that there must be some providential force at work, some purpose that Calvin and I are to play in one another’s lives this evening.

That turns out not exactly to be true. Well, not in the sense I’m imagining. I, at least, have a purpose: to get Calvin to the train station before the last train to New York departs the Windsor station, which is supposed to happen sooner than the GPS guesses we’ll arrive. 

I ask Calvin a few cheerful questions as we make our way to I-91 South. He answers a couple. Then he says, “You ask a lot of questions.”

These were not hard or probing questions, more like: “Where are you coming from? Oh, Brooklyn? I like Brooklyn; what part? Oh, Bushwick? What do you do there?” But I guess I’ve gone somewhere Calvin doesn’t want to go. Chastened, I apologize.

“Nah. It’s not like that. I just don’t know.” I have no idea what he means. But, of course, I’m afraid to ask another question. So I just focus on beating the clock to the train station. We race across the tracks at the station just before the gates close because the train is pulling in. Calvin is going to make it.

• 9:06 PM. Windsor, Connecticut. 181.3 miles driven. 19 rides completed. 1 ride to go.

It is now 9:06 pm. I am an hour from home. I still have to do one more ride. But I am euphoric. I set the destination filter for my home address and hit go. I get back on I-91 heading north. I don’t care what happens anymore. I get a ride request in a few minutes, drive 20 minutes north to pick up a guy at a convenience store in Enfield, Connecticut, and take him to his apartment five minutes away. We say only hello, thank you, and goodbye. And I’m done. 

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. 

Is that all there is? I’m drained for sure, but I also feel like that was an anticlimactic ending, as though my day should be a story crafted by a benevolent narrator who’d like me to have satisfying closure. 

My head knows that’s not how the universe works. But my heart doesn’t care. Deep down I kind of believe it is how the universe works.

I resolve this standoff by giving my head a different reason to take another ride: I’m still forty-five minutes from home and might get one more ride to pad my wallet on the way. 

My head consents.

• 9:28 PM. Suffield, Connecticut. 196.3 miles driven. 20 rides completed. 0 rides to go. 

I get Diego outside of the Longhorn steakhouse in Enfield, where he, too, is finishing a long shift. Diego greets me in Spanish, and I do the same. We commiserate over long work hours. 

Diego’s from Puerto Rico and lives in Springfield. Diego asks me where I’m from. I explain that my parents were from Spain, but that I grew up in the states. Spain! The motherland! I laugh. He sounds like my dad.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“But your Spanish’s really good.”

During the ride up to his place, I explain that we had to speak Spanish at home growing up. My dad made us pay a fine into a piggy bank shaped like a soldier that sat on our dining table every time we spoke English at meals.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Diego says now in English. “Nowadays, kids don’t wanna remember where they’re from. They just wanna fit in.” 

“Maybe,” I say. “I did too, though.” I tell him how when I was little I’d proposed to my dad that we change my name to Jim. By now, I’ve pulled into Diego’s driveway. 

“My dad hit the roof,” I tell him, “yelling about how I don’t care about the patria, about my people.” Diego laughs. 

“I bet he did.” He shakes his head. “Man, if my kid says something like that to me, I’ll knock his teeth in.” He punches his fist loudly into his palm. I laugh uneasily. 

Once again, Diego punches his fist loudly into his palm. 

“I’ll knock his teeth in,” he repeats before he laughs with unsettling ease and then raises the still-closed fist to me, offering a bump, which I accept before he gets out of the car.

I log out and close the app, barely noticing the earnings displayed at the top of the screen.

I get back onto I-91, heading north, Springfield glittering tentatively on my right, the Connecticut River dark and steady on my left. 

I’m glad it’s just Milo and me. 

• 10:11 pm. Easthampton, Massachusetts. 216.6 miles driven. 21 rides completed. -1 rides to go.

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