The Lesson

I had just deplaned in Austin after a torturous flight from Sacramento. The weather had been bad when we lifted off and didn’t seem to get much better throughout the flight, with an unexpected delay in Vegas that lasted more than three hours. I was already wound up tight for this trip, a work gig that was going to involve either me or someone else losing their job, so the tension of the delays didn’t help me much. Turbulence makes me nervous, and I could definitely feel my shoulders and my gut paying the price. Needless to say, when the plane finally landed, I was more than ready to disembark.

I collected my bags and followed the signs to the ride share area, where I placed my order for a car to take me to my hotel downtown. The sun was edging down in the west, and my watch showed it was a little later than I expected, taking me a little while to factor in the time change coming through two time zones to Texas. It all made me feel a little grumpier and I just wanted to get to the fucking hotel.

An immaculate white Toyota RAV4 pulled up.

“Jonas? Jonas Parker?”

“That’s me.”

“One moment, sir. Please allow me to load your bags.”

An older gentleman in a straw Stetson hat, early to late 50s, I estimated, hopped out of the driver’s side as the hatchback slid up. He moved well, wearing a maroon dry fit polo shirt with some college insignia on the left chest, clean but faded Levis, and what looked like Timberland hiking boots. “Pleased to meet you, sir,” he said, extending his hand in greeting while he simultaneously took my suitcase with the other. I caught the faint glitter of a small diamond in the center of what looked like a college ring as we shook hands. “My name is Bartholomew. Welcome to Austin!”

I nodded in assent and followed him to the passenger door, which he opened quickly and easily. He closed it behind me as I settled in and buckled up, then circled round the back of the car and settled himself into the driver’s seat.

“There are bottles of water and soda in the cooler on the floor, Mr. Parker, if you’re thirsty,” Bartholomew said as he pulled his own seat belt over himself after removing his Stetson. “My map tells me we’ll hit some heavy traffic on the way into town, so just wanted to make you aware of that. It’ll be at least half an hour before we get to your hotel.”

I grimaced. “I expected to be here hours ago,” I grumbled. “Stuck in Vegas for three hours.”

Bartholomew nodded as he eased into traffic. “Yeah, the weather from Cali all the way through the Southwest has been in the news all day. Sorry for your trouble, sir.”

I don’t know what it was, but the sincerity, the simple empathy of his reply made me relax, and I didn’t expect to feel that. I found myself stretching my neck out, astonished at how tight it was, and feeling the resistance as I turned my head from side to side. It felt like a bowstring on either side, and with each successive stretch it got a little looser. It felt good. The AC in the car felt good. The vibe with Bartholomew felt good. I found myself reaching for the cooler, pulled out a water bottle, cracked open the seal, and in spite of myself drank nearly the whole thing down in one gulp.

I could feel Bartholomew smiling as he watched me in the camera screen of the car. “It appears you were a little dehydrated, Mr. Parker,” he said, smiling warmly. “Help yourself to another. Those Ollipop sodas are pretty good, too, if you’re interested. You can just leave the empty bottle on the seat. I’ll take care of it after I let you out.” I chugged down the remaining water and pulled out another, drinking this one a lot more slowly.

“Would you prefer music or silence, Mr. Parker?”

“Silence, if you don’t mind.”

“No problem, sir.”

We drove on down, following the energy of the traffic flow, which seemed to soothe me a bit, which I found interesting. I guess it reminded me of home, until I realized it wasn’t really soothing me, it was just the familiarity of low-level tension that I could not control. And then an interesting thing happened, something I’d not really seen before, or if I had, hadn’t really registered as more than an annoyance to me in California.

We were on a major street named, aptly enough, Airport Boulevard. There were lights every mile or so, maybe spaced further apart, and we were in the right lane of a three-lane street. Strip centers lined this particular part of the journey, and as we were at a stop awaiting a light change, Bartholomew stayed still even as the light turned green, long enough to allow a big pickup truck to merge into traffic ahead of us. I could see the driver ahead of us waving in thanks, and Bartholomew lifted his left hand off the wheel in acknowledgement.

But the damn thing about it was, he did it again about ten minutes later.

And then he did it again 15 minutes after that.

And at that point, I had to ask. “Do you do that all the time, let people in like that?”

Bartholomew seemed a little taken aback by the question. “Yeah, now that you mention it. I try not to miss an opportunity to do that.”

“Is that like a Texas thing, or what?”

He wrinkled up his face as he thought about the question. “Maybe. I mean, I grew up in a rural area in South Texas a long time ago. The kinda place that was a lot of small county roads and bucolic city streets, you know?”

I shook my head. “Not really, man. I’m a big city guy, always have been.”

Bartholomew nodded. “Right on, I get that. Back then, when we saw someone on the road coming toward us, we would wave at them, just a friendly way of saying hello. We usually knew who everyone was based on the vehicles, but even if it was someone we didn’t know, we’d wave at each other. Because if you got stranded out there, had a flat or something, you had no Triple A to call, no cell phones to get hold of anyone. You fixed your own flats, doctored your own vehicles, but I figure nine times out of ten, someone would stop and help you out, whether they knew you or not.”

“Nine times out of ten?” I couldn’t hide my incredulity. “Seriously?”

Bartholomew laughed, eying me in the rear-view mirror. “Yes sir. Nine times out of ten. Hell, I’ve had that happen more than a few times since I’ve been living in Austin. And I’ve been a city dog here now for more than 40 years.”

I could only shake my head at the thought. “Man,” I said softly. “That’s not something I’d even consider in California.”

“Times change,” Bartholomew said, as he checked his blind spot and moved over into the center and then left lanes of the street. “People are more in a hurry now, cars are different now, and sometimes it’s just dangerous to do that, you know?”

I could only nod, but it felt like I was viewing something missing in my life that I didn’t even know mattered to me.

“Bartholomew,” I asked gently, “why do you do it?”

He pursed his lips in thought. “Well, there’s that upbringing I mentioned, coming from a small town, I imagine that’s got something to do with it. But if I look at it from my personal perspective, I guess it all boils down to me just wanting to put a little good back into the world, Mr. Parker.”

His answer took me by surprise. “Jason, please. And what do you mean?”

“Well, I look at it like this, Jason. We are sharing a resource we’ve all paid for and we all use: the road. And in a lot of instances, depending on time of day, traffic, wrecks, what have you, that resource is limited in some way or another. My belief system tells me that we are interconnected, and there is no more visual way of understanding that interconnectedness than by trying to get downtown from the airport on a Thursday afternoon, you know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Now, I can dread the trips and stress about how long they take and be consciously unaware of the people around me who need to merge into a lane I’m in, but that basically amounts to me denying their humanity. And that means I’m not working consciously for the common good. I’m placing myself over the common good.

“That’s not how I want to live my life, or rather, how I’ve chosen to live my life. I choose to be a light unto the world, in ways big and small.”

I took a while to digest all this. “But what about when people don’t return the favor to you? When some Cali prick in a Tesla with custom plates cuts you off and then gives you the bird to boot?”

He laughed hard and long, shaking his head as he did, and his long, curly white hair rippled as he guffawed.

“Ok, there are two parts to that answer,” he said, after settling down. “And, thanks for the laugh, by the way.”

I bowed my head at the gratitude.

“The first part is that I have no control over anyone’s actions, thoughts, or feelings other than my own. I don’t know what my brother or sister from Cali is going through that would cause them to be so inconsiderate, but it must be something big, and all I can do is offer compassion for that level of selfishness, which comes from and causes suffering. The second part is I don’t let people into traffic expecting it from others. That would make the act itself transactional, and done not from grace but from an ulterior motive. And that would make it a false act, and again, not done for the common good.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, it happens a LOT that I get people letting me in, but I don’t keep a tally of how many help me versus how many I help. I’m just grateful for the experience in the present. Does all that make sense?”

“It’s surely making me think, that’s for sure, Bartholomew.”

He smiled. “Well, that’s a good thing, because we are arriving at your hotel.”

He pulled into the entry circle of the Radisson in downtown Austin, hopping out of the car as he put on his Stetson. When I met him at the back of the RAV4, the hatch was already up and he’d pulled my bag to the concrete.

“It was my pleasure to serve you today, Jason,” he said, extending his hand. “I really enjoyed talking to you.”

“You gave me a lot to think about, Bartholomew,” I said, taking his hand. “I really appreciate that.”

He smiled, covering my wrist with his free hand before releasing his grip. “Sir, I can think of no higher compliment. Thank you, and I hope everything works out for you in Austin.”

And then he touched his fingers to the brim of his Stetson, nodded a little nod, and hopped back into his car to take his next fare. I waved goodbye as he circled out of the Radisson entryway.

***

The meeting the next day went completely differently than I expected, and I found myself thinking a lot about what Bartholomew had said to me as we made our trek from the airport to the hotel. I tried to come at things from a different perspective, made it a point to ask questions of someone I’d thought of up to this point as an adversary, someone who was fucking up my scheduling because of his incompetence. But it wasn’t about incompetence.

It was because he had a sick kid.

And no one had ever asked him about her, and he didn’t want to bring her up, because in our business, to do so would’ve been considered weakness and a lack of commitment to the company. And as he poured out his heart to us – just because I simply asked him, “What’s going on?” – it made me feel both like a heel for being so self-centered and like I was a different person for helping come up with the simple solution of asking a question and then giving him the resources he needed to take care of his personal and professional needs. I was looking at it as Bartholomew would describe as seeking the common good.

When the meeting was over and I was packing up my stuff for the return trip, I realized I hadn’t gotten a message from the rideshare service about leaving Bartholomew a tip, so I checked my phone messages through the service to see if I could find it. I looked through the messages from every trip I’d taken for the last two months – and there was no request to close the transaction.

Confused, I checked my bank account to see if I could access the service from that end.

There was no record of charges for that trip from the airport.