Updating Descartes: I travel so I can talk to strangers. Updating Descartes again: I travel so I can reality-check the words of writers against the wisdom of Uber drivers. Using that as a measure, AWP was stupendous!
No wonder we pay drivers to sit in their cars for twenty, thirty minutes, through traffic snarls and horrifically inflated rates. One driver, slung back in his seat of his Toyota Corolla, reeled off a lovely phrase about not recognizing what privilege is when we have it. That line could stand in any poem, I said, as I’d been sitting through a lot of poetry readings. He told me his line was borrowed; I added that we pick up a lot of folk wisdom through pop songs, rap, movies. He upped me: through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius.
Getting into another Uber, I asked the driver how he was. “Any day I’m still alive is a good day.” What an opening line, even if we’ve heard it before. I got to hear about Mamma in rural South Carolina, his 94-year-old mother-in-law, the whole array of sisters down there, the food and beverage that comes with visitors, the testifying, the cigarettes and coffee that fortify the old lady. He was beaming the whole time.
When I told the first driver about an award-winning book of poetry written about conversations heard by a cabbie, he was incredulous. “Are you telling me that book won awards?” Indeed. “Bor-ing,” he said. “I’d shut that in a second.”