One of the more common types of trips I get when driving a cab is the sweet little old lady. I take her home from the grocery store, I take her to medical appointments, I take her back to the assisted living place.
There’s one, a blind lady, that I take to church. Not only does she give me precise directions — she. of course, doesn’t realize I’ve taken her a few times — but then she tells me where to turn when we’re at each intersection! (Blind people kind of amaze me; one guy could tell when the train we were waiting for had cleared the intersection, just by sound.)
This particular little old lady was going home from a supermarket, and she had a few bags of groceries. We somehow got onto the subject of camping, and bears, and she got all worked up in her little-old-lady way, scrunching up her face and saying, “Oh, I do not like those bears! I don’t like them one bit. They are cute, but they’re sneaky, and they just want to take all your food and eat it all up!”
I was totally charmed by this lady, not least because she kept telling me what a sweet young man I was, how well I was raised, and how she was going to give me an extra dollar on her usual tip, because I carried all her groceries to the door and helped her step out of the cab.
I was feeling all warm and fuzzy when we got to her door, and as I was walking away, she said in her sweet, trembling voice, “Thank you again — it’s so nice to have a white cab driver!”