I’ve mentioned before that I drive for one of the car sharing services to help make ends meet while I work on a book about my experiences growing up in Richmond.
A few days ago I had a passenger who told me about her niece, who had turned 6 years old a couple months ago. Her niece’s mother worked at a rest home, and her niece decided that she wanted to have her birthday party where mommy worked – at the rest home, in the day room.
The day of the party, the niece and her friends flooded into the day room, and for two hours they ate birthday cake, played games, sang songs and made friends with the residents of the rest home.
There is something about 6-year olds that make them perfect companions for lonely old folks – they have an unadorned, open-hearted truthfulness and kindness that can melt the most obstinate heart:
“Do you get scared sometimes?”
“What was your birthday like?”
The residents of that rest home still speak fondly of that day, months later.
Hearing my passenger describe that, I thought of walking the streets of Rome, Italy, a couple years ago.
It was obvious that Italians structure their society differently than Americans. The streets were teeming with people, but the character of the crowds was not like the frenetic, goal-oriented rush of the crowds in Midtown Manhattan or downtown San Francisco. The streets of Rome are not just means, but ends in themselves – they are where the inhabitants of that city live their lives. Walking the cobbled streets north of Vatican City, I regularly saw three generations of families out for a stroll – grandparents and parents with young children in tow, all enjoying each other’s company, children telling grandparents about their day.
I’ve mentioned before that someone from Africa once remarked to New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges that “Americans must be the loneliest people in the world,” and the evidence of this for me only increases with time.

***

Speaking of community building, I sometimes buy a box of donuts for my passengers to eat. I enjoy giving them a nice surprise at the end of a workday. Last Monday was one of those days. I picked up a young woman who had obviously had a Really Bad Day, looking really stressed out.
After she got in, I said “There’s some donuts back there – they’re for passengers, so feel free–” and then she burst into tears.
Sometimes you say the right thing.

***

The other day I dropped a passenger off on Arlington Boulevard in the Richmond hills, and since I was within half a mile of my old junior high school, I decided to head over and get my middle-age nostalgia fix. Adams Middle School closed at the end of the 2009 school year, and has sat empty since, as the city bureaucracy has wrestled toward a decision of its ultimate fate
As I drove up to the school, it struck me how absurd it was to wax nostalgic about my middle school days. I don’t think a single human being has ever uttered the sentence, “Middle school – now those were good days!”
And yet, there I was, staring through windows gauzed with seven years of accumulated dust, into dim and empty halls lit by late afternoon light that was the color of ancient parchment, and I ached for the youth I was fleeing with all my strength at the time. I longed to be relieved of the accumulated disillusion that 54 years have burdened me with; I remembered a girl named Pamela who was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and though I barely ever spoke to her, she made those years fractionally more bearable because the world had her in it.
I looked across playgrounds that will never again echo with the anguish and triumph that is the play of middle schoolers.
I realized that these nostalgia trips are my way of coming to terms with the ever-more-tangible reality that life is a finite gift. There are people I went to that school with who have already left this world – some of the kids from down in the Richmond flats were eaten long ago my the streets, others claimed by overdoses and car accidents.
As I turned away, those morbid thoughts were pushed aside by the sight of a bush up the hill that was blooming profusely, with a scattering of petals forming a halo around its roots. I realized that while death may be an unavoidable reality, the present world, and each moment of our life we spend in it, is a gift that can make the journey toward our end more bearable. I resolved to be more present to everyone in my life. Or, as someone once said, “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.”

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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