Lyft Chronicles: Grow up

I drive Lyft and I'm not exactly sure why. Sure, I need about $400 a month to pay for my Medicare coverage, which is pretty important because I'm not drawing any Social Security until at least next May, when I reach my Social Security full retirement age.

But I like stories and watching the human condition, and while I think MPR pretty much beat the enjoyment of writing out of me, I like these stories now in their anecdotal form -- the form where I don't have to do much work to tell them; the form where they are a mere springboard to bigger, occasionally deeper thoughts.

I didn't have any Minnesota Twins games to work last week or this, so I needed to get out yesterday and drive a little bit to make a few bucks, and two rides served as bookends to reach this big and deep thought: people need to grow up a little when it comes to relationships.

This is a pretty easy conclusion to reach even if strangers weren't hopping in the car. I'm watching my wife watch her mother die.  The other afternoon, I watched her stroke her mom's forehead as she tried to get her to rest, and have a few minutes when she wasn't saying "help me."

It's hard to take anything else particularly seriously in those moments or for days afterward, which is probably why I have so little patience for the drama we insist on putting ourselves through with one another.

Like the woman I picked up  at a hotel in Plymouth, for example, who didn't have time for niceties like "hello" when she hopped in. She was in the middle of a conversation with whomever she was trying to salvage a relationship with.

I only heard one half of the conversation, which lasted the entire 15 minute trip with few details other than she she cited a litany of grievances -- some real, some imagined, perhaps. She alighted with nary a "thank you" as she was still issuing her demands upon her exit.

Hours later, I swung by a park-and-ride lot for the State Fair shuttle buses to pick up a young man who had nothing to say when he got in the car.

"30th Avenue?" I had to repeat several times at increasing decibels before he pulled the earbuds out.

"30th Avenue?" I repeated.

"Yep," he said, reinstalling the plugs so that he could continue the conversation he, too, was having with someone with whom he was having a relationship.

His complaint was that the person at the other hand end of the line always talked about something with which he had no interest. He found that disrespectful of what he cared about, whatever that was, but I'm going to guess what he cared about most was himself. It was hard to tell whether he was ending his relationship or still saw embers of hope in it.

I never learned what it was he/she talked about too much but I did learn that it "didn't turn him on" and "there's much more to life" than whatever he had to listen to too much.

He/she must have said that he never said he loved him or her.

"My love is my actions, not my words," he said as we drove in the midnight darkness over the Lake Street bridge toward the destination that must not be named.  He explained that all of his life -- I'm guessing 24 years or so -- people have told him one thing and done another, and let him down, so he was done with the meaning of words.  He was telling her that her words meant nothing.

I was thankful for the darkness, which prevented him from seeing my rolling eyes.

I wanted to grab the phone and tell the secret caller that he/she should run, not walk, from this guy.

I wanted to tell my rider that my mother in law is dying, that my wife of 37 years strokes her forehead to ease her way into another place that may or may not exist, not that it really matters because  life is the right now and the way we give of ourselves to people we love, asking nothing in return but the privilege of being in the presence of such love.

The young man who may never experience such moments was still issuing his own demands as he alighted.

"Thank you," he said over his shoulder.

"Have a great night," I said so he could hear.

"And grow up," I said so he couldn't.