longer.blue

A customer writes: I remember reading one of your essays in your catalog after 9/11 about a buying trip in Turkey and your conversation with your taxi driver. We all need to remember our shared humanity. Continue the good fight. I’ll fight in my own small way. Our hands are meant for holding good food and each other. Love C.K. TAXI This ride started like so many—in silence. Istanbul (Constantinople) is a very old, very large city, and the airport builders had to go a long way from the center of town to find an open area big enough to land a 747. Along the drive we started to talk. The driver's English was not great, and my Turkish was nonexistent so communication was tough. He had studied to be an engineer in Germany and with my Wisconsin upbringing we were able to use a combination of a little English and a little German to get a conversation started. After a few minutes of small talk, he paused a moment and asked me where I was from. I was surprised to find myself nervous about answering that question. I must admit that even I was wondering in the weeks after 9/11 if my experience and belief that the world is a good place was correct. There were warnings before I left about not making it obvious to strangers that you are American while traveling. Here I was halfway around the world and miles from anyone I knew. No one back home knew where I was other than that I had checked out of the hotel and had a flight later that day. Bad thoughts go through your head a month after 9/11 when someone who looks like he could be one of the terrorist's roommates from Frankfurt asks you where you are from. Still I was not going to let my thoughts get the best of me, so I told him I was an American. I was watching his eyes in the rear-view mirror and I saw a sadness come over him. It seems I was not the only one in this taxi that was having a hard time coming to grips with what the post 9/11 world would be. Like so many people I met on this trip across the Islamic world, from Turkey to Malaysia, my driver was having a tough time coming to grips with the emotions he felt. Through broken bits of English and German he got those feelings across to me. For him there was a deep sadness for the victims of the terrorists. So often we here in the States brush aside thoughts we don't want to deal with. But for my driver and many others I was surprised that they spoke of these deaths as though they were the deaths of their own family members. Their grief was immense, but coupled with their grief was an anger. An anger that someone could have done this monstrous deed and then tried to say they did it for their religion. Over and over the driver said to me in English so I would not miss the point that this was not Islam, not Islam, not Islam. Though this alone is a good story it is not the moment that this tale is about. That moment happened without me noticing, what must have been about three miles from the airport. I pride myself on being a savvy traveler. In a taxi I sit where I can watch the road, see the taximeter and keep an eye on the speedometer. But what happened to me on that ride was nothing that has ever happened to me before or since. Somewhere about three miles from the airport I must have been distracted by the taxi driver's words, thinking about what he had to say. Somewhere about three miles from the airport while I was looking the other way the driver reached over and turned off his meter and quickly restarted it. We got to the airport, I looked at the meter and for what should have been a $16 fare, the meter read the Turkish equivalent of $1.85. At first I thought I had dropped a zero in the wrong place when I did the conversion, but no, he wanted $1.85. I was stunned. I had taken the same trip three times in the last four days. I knew it should be roughly $16 plus a little extra for luggage and a tip. It is one thing to say you feel bad about what has happened, it is another thing to undercharge a random American by $15 to do something about it. $15 is a lot of money in Turkey. We were standing there looking at each other and I was trying to figure out what to do. In the back of my mind was that old Harry Chapin song "Taxi." So I handed him the Turkish equivalent of $20 for a $1.85 fare and told him to keep the change. He tried to give me change, I would not take it. He shook my hand with more feeling than I had felt in a handshake in a long time. We walked away. Nothing in the world had really changed, but for the two of us it felt like it had. Thanks for being our customer, Bill bill@penzeys.com