After a few moments, my passenger started a conversation. It began ordinarily enough: "How do you like driving a cab?"
"It's OK," I said. "I make a living and meet interesting people sometimes. How about you? His reply intrigued me.
"I would not change jobs even if I could make twice as much money doing something else."
I'd never heard that before. "What do you do?''
"I'm in the neurology department at New York Hospital."
Then I decided to ask for this man's help. We were not far from the airport.
"Could I ask a big favor of you? I have a son, 15, a good kid. He wants a job, but a 15-year-old can't get hired unless his old man knows someone who owns a business, and I don't." I paused. "Is there any possibility that you could get him some kind of summer job?"
He didn't respond for a while. Finally, he said: "Well, the medical students have a summer research project. Maybe he could fit in. Have him send me his school record." I tore off a piece of my brown lunch bag, and he scribbled his name on it and paid me. It was the last time I ever saw him.
After I nagged, yelled, and finally threatened to cut off his pocket money, my son Robbie sent off his grades to the guy the next morning.
Two weeks later, when I arrived home from work, my son was beaming. He handed me a letter from my passenger, saying he was to call my passenger's secretary for an interview.
Robbie got the job. He did minor tasks, unpaid, but he fit in well. The following summer, he worked at the hospital again with more responsibility. As high school graduation neared, Dr Plum was kind enough to write letters of recommendation for Robbie and he was accepted by Brown University. Finally, Dr Robert Stern, the son of a taxicab driver, became OB-GYN chief president at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.
Some might call it fate, and I guess it was. But it shows that something as ordinary as a taxi ride can change your life.
