by Jane Paznik-Bondarin

The expression has become a cliché, and maybe some day I’ll think of a better one, but those words leapt into my brain when the cab driver started talking, and for now they are the best I have. “I raised three kids on my own,” he said. “All by myself.” The opening gambit of the conversation-starved New York City cabman. A seasoned New Yorker, I half-listened, at least in part because of his accent, which required more attention than I thought I wanted to pay.

He was older than the average driver. Reflected in his rear-view mirror, I saw the profile of a compact, leathery face framed by white hair. Through the opening of the safety barrier, I saw deep creases radiating from the corner of his right eye. Turkish, I thought from the swarthy complexion and the accent, although later I decided that I had been wrong. Latino, maybe. I never saw his name.

“When the last of them finished college, I started going away on the weekends,” he said, responding to my remark that I was leaving town—he was dropping me at the bus station—to enjoy the last of the warm September days by the ocean. “I tell the young drivers, ‘Give up the fifty bucks and spend a day looking at the leaves with your family. But I know they won’t. I didn’t when I needed the money to raise my family.”

I smiled and said the fewest obligatory words to show I was listening. It doesn’t take much to keep New York cab drivers talking. More than give-and-take, they need a live body to witness their words. Then he said, “They were born in Vietnam, my kids, during the war.”

“What?” I said.

“Yeah,” he responded. “I brought them home with me. I couldn’t get their mother out, but I brought them home.”

“Did she join you eventually?” I asked. Now I was interested.

“No,” he said, less loudly than he’d been talking. Safety barriers between front and back seats, the driver facing away from the conversation (if you’re lucky), jack-hammers and machinery noise make for loud talk in taxis. But now he was talking as much to memory as to me. “No, I brought them up by myself.”

All three, I learned, graduated from college, all have careers that would support their father without him having to drive a cab.

I busied myself pulling out my wallet, arranging bills and coins in one hand, organizing my bags in the other. And I thought about this man—the young soldier he’d been and the older father he is now. I thought about how he’d lived his life and what he’d gained and lost in that war. I imagined how he’d lived his life since then. I thought, too, about who I was in those years: first, a youngster watching the first televised war, hearing the term “human wave assault” for the first time; then, a student stopping short of public protest. It took half a lifetime to find my kinship with men and women about my age who did not make it home from there as I read excerpts from their letters, etched into a memorial at the foot of New York, in that wounded part of Manhattan Island that will never be the same. We can weep for all of the disappeared together. And I thought about this man, who did come home.

What else was there to say?

He pulled up in front of the station. “Enjoy your days,” he said in an accent that now had become easy to understand.

“And you, too,” I replied. “Go see the ocean.”

“I will.”

Jane Paznik-Bondarin's heart lives in New York City.
Her email is: jpaznik@nyc.rr.com .

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