My first blog post. I’m terrified but here goes. Just a short explanation of my getting here.
For a few years, I took a bit of a break from a lot of pressure trying to keep work and family together, finally becoming just plain exhausted and demoralized. I completely understand I’m not unique in that, and that so many people face these circumstances without the support I was so very lucky to have. So no whining.
During that fallow time I knew that I could return to the work, somehow or another, which I’ve always cared most about, and which I’d proved I could do well, sometimes very well. Suddenly in March of this year, I found myself back in Austin, and on the path to recovering that purpose. In a year so destructive for so many, I could not believe my luck.
Then the month of October knocked the breath from me. (Things are much better now.) But during that short time, when things were a little crazy, I found myself in conversation with a lot of the Lyft drivers who helped me get around. The gig economy does not treat them fairly, and they fully know it, and it does not need to be that way—topic for a later post. My personal budget took a hit but I’m glad at least some of it went to them.
My point is this. In my own writing now, I want to connect the themes of social and economic fairness which I specialized in professionally, with the lived understanding of people who know exactly what’s going on even if they don’t use the jargon or the technical tools to describe it.
Those Lyft drivers have been my bridge. So in this post, I’d just like to relate some of the things some of them shared with me. That simple.
It’s striking to me how often we talked about work. Mine’s not real easy to briefly explain so mostly I asked about theirs. (One driver did tell me that my efforts as a professor, policy researcher, and writer were important because they helped people think. Yes, I heard that on Lyft, and it was just what I needed on that particular day.)
I’m adding my ride today, January 15, 2021, at the top. A Tesla. In my daily reality, Tesla (the car, not the actual person) is just a concept. I sold my last car, manual transmission, years ago and get around fine without, renting if needed. But if I ever buy another, it would look and feel like today’s Lyft ride. Oh my it was gorgeous. But more to the point. The driver was living entirely on Lyft and Uber passengers and with enough to support his family…and…invest in SpaceX. So we really do live in a disruptive economy. He said that he’d told his children to skip college, just be smart.
One of my earlier rides was with a former New Yorker, driving a very big SUV, who’d owned a business exporting luxury vehicles to China. When the tariffs took hold, his stock sat at the port in Long Beach, his overseas customers believed he was cheating on them, and they canceled their orders. Now he rents out the big trailer truck that used to haul those cars to the port, and…drives a Lyft. (And he married his sweetheart anyway and could not stop grinning.)
The other New Yorker missed the neighborhood stoops in his home town and hated Texas, but here he could find work. We also compared New York/Chicago hot dogs and New York/Chicago pizza. He said, “I knew they had hot dogs in Chicago but they have pizza too?”
Because Texas, some of the drivers connected their religious beliefs and practices to their economic situations. On one ride, a woman who might have been in her fifties but looked at least ten years older (because poverty) told me that once she started tithing, her own life found relief. A city program is giving her housing assistance now, and some help with roof repairs. A couple of others gave me blessings at the end of the ride. No one said “namaste.” (No disrespect to namaste—it comes close to my own lazy-ish spiritual practice. And tonglen. And nine bows.)
Some of the drivers in their twenties and thirties expressed huge anger at generational unfairness. They’re right. Another topic for multiple future posts.
Many were immigrants. When I liked, and asked about, the music they played in the car, we talked about their coming to the United States with hope, and about our families. One was from Casablanca—it’s my dream to go to Morocco when Americans are welcomed to the world again. He told me I should feel proud of my own son for working long hours at an exhausting and stressful job, and of my kid’s recent promotion largely due to talent and passion for the work. Another was from Havana, and at the end of the ride he picked up a call from his clearly young daughter, greeting him with “papa,” and gave me a thumbs up at my pathetic Spanish “gracias” as he smiled to hear from her. A young man from East Africa came here on a college scholarship to play tennis and now coaches at a private club in affluent northwest Austin. A nice man from, I’m guessing, Eastern Europe, spoke zero English. Just gestures, hand-to-heart and bows.
One driver, from Venezuela, was named for a founder of the Soviet Union.
A young woman had just got a job washing hair at a downtown Austin salon and was glad to have it. Another woman hated driving Lyft and really wanted out.
One great thing about using Lyft–so many people have found their ways to Austin through paths of other places I’ve also lived and loved. A business/corporate lawyer’s practice here had not done well in the last few years because of things she could not control. She was from the Berkshires in Massachusetts, stunningly beautiful and somewhere I would revisit in a heartbeat, and hoped to return to her profession a little differently as a public interest attorney. We bonded on the virtues of double-sided tape for walls and shoes. One young man driving a Prius was from Sacramento, where I did my predissertation research on public interest lobbying, who liked Austin (and weed) a lot.
I had a very cordial conversation with one man who had voted for the loser, even though I admitted I’m a Warren/Sanders (way before anyone else noticed him) /AOC progressive who firmly believes that in a society as wealthy as ours, theres’s no excuse for the failure of basic safety nets. A civil, even generous, talk.
(Aside from work and money, and although I’m not at all a sci-fi/fantasy person, it was fun to talk with a driver who is, about our favorite Lord of the Rings scenes–mine would involve Legolas, and especially the Oliphant head shake.)
(Also aside. A conversation with a driver about the merits of meditation, contemplation, and rumination (no merit). And the similarities of Catholicism and Buddhism, and the friendship of Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh. And the part of my book proposal that deals with the New Deal/WPA Writers’ Project. That conversation really happened, in a ride-hailing car. It really did.)
(Another aside. Turns out a driver had been a student in my department at the University of Texas when I taught there. Elbow bump.)
In a move open to interpretation, on election day all Lyft rides to the polls were priced at 50 percent off. Because Texas, I’d already voted early.
Dayna Finet 