Taxi Drivers and Tracy Chapman

While sorting through my documents a couple of nights ago, I chanced upon a small notebook that contained a daily journal of my vacation in Brazil in 2007. I realized I never ‘blogged’ about it, maybe because of the lack of time, or because I was confident that it was already documented. Anyway, while I was leafing through the entries, I was pleasantly surprised to find something I wrote, an excerpt of it I copied below:

March 4, 2007

Another cab to another airport on my way back from Salvador, Bahia to Rio de Janeiro. The driver turned on his radio and surprise, surprise, Tracy Chapman was on. So I started singing-along “Give me one reason to stay here, and I’ll turn right back around”. ..The next song was Brazilian, sounded familiar but I did not know the lyrics. I saw the driver glance at me from his rearview mirror and without saying a word I sort of understood that he said, “now it’s my turn”. Then he started singing along at the top of his voice.

Hmmm, the showdown was on. The next song was another Brazilian song that the driver sang but the next song was mine, and a Sting song at that. “We’ll be together, we’ll be together…” I sang the whole song the rest of the way with the driver nodding his head in tune with the song. At the airport, we said goodbye like we were old friends, I even gave him a hug, and all this without a single word being exchanged between us (I do not speak his language, he does not speak the language I use). We just shared a drive and some music and that was enough.

End of entry.

I was pretty amused because just recently, I had come from Taiwan. I had a meeting in an area an hour away from Taipei and instead of renting a car, my colleague arranged for a cab to take us, wait for us there, and take us back. Turned out, the driver is a Filipino who is now a Taiwanese citizen. He hooked up his I-phone and played his I-pod- and instantly I recognized the first song. It was Tracy Chapman’s The Promise and I have not heard that song for the longest time. And I happen to love the song and when I sing it, I feel I own it. So again, as is my habit, I sang along with my old friend Tracy. Another Tracy song followed that one.

I was at a tough meeting for four hours but when I got back into the cab, the driver was ready with the song. I did not even have to ask. This time, the driver sang along with me, and we sang at the top of our voices. My colleague was amused.

Naturally, I arranged for him to pick me up at 5am the next day for the airport. Like the day before, we listened to Tracy, but singing The Promise at dawn is not the same thing, it takes on an extra element of sadness. So we sang it under our breaths, each lost in our own thoughts, and singing, “in your arms, where all my journeys end…” I so badly wanted to ask who he was singing that song for, where she was, and when he was coming home to the country he said he badly missed, but I did not.