“I write about my commutes,” I told him at about the half-way point on another bright expansive sky morning in Miami. The traffic was unusually light on the McArthur Causeway for nine in the morning.
“Ok, I’m going to tell you the story,” he said while glancing at the route displayed on his phone. “Now… we don’t have a lot of time,” he told me.
He seemed to have predicted a writer for his morning, like perhaps meteorologists predict precipitation levels after morning coffee. The sure tone in his voice confirmed that he had prepared for the performative moment, perhaps in between passenger pick-ups and drop-offs. He took a deep breath in and let out his life’s story in high-dubbed speed sentences, barely leaving half seconds between his sentences. It was inconsequential that I hadn’t expected a storyteller for a driver, much less a whole life story.
“Ok, wow, yes, ok,” I said.
“My parents were born in Poland. They survived a concentration camp. Two weeks later they migrated to Italy. I was born in Torino. We got a break and landed in Brooklyn, New York.”
I was getting ready to talk about Poland and Auszwitz perhaps or the banality of evil, but he hurried along between capitalized first words and periods, letting me know that the early 1940s would not the setting of the morning’s story.
“It was me, my brother and sister. We all became professionals. After three years…I was allergic to accounting.”
He had hit the fast-forward button on the parts of his childhood and his parents. I suspected there were stories of struggle and heartbreak in the Torino to Brooklyn chapter, but he hadn’t set a melancholic tone. And the immigrant’s coming of age theme was not in his storytellers style.
“Well, I was playing tennis in the winter time. I worked my way through college in the Catskill mountains, until I became a tennis instructor full-time,” he told me. He had captured my attention when he uttered the word, ‘tennis’, it was in a full of life tone.
He then skipped a few decades and only said six words about his Brooklyn to Miami Beach move, “we were ready for something new.” The perhaps abrupt life change was also not at the heart of his story, it was a point along the plot that revealed how he got to tennis, the protagonist of his life’s story, as I finally figured out. He still left me with no downbeats to reply.
“Ten years after I became a tennis instructor, I started a company. We managed the tennis court in Flamingo Park. When a new mayor came in, we lost it. Well…politics. Now, I have Uber.”
It seemed that this was when the story moved to a sad drama. But his next sentence let me know that this would not be about a life of small successes and large failures.
“I then realized, I was waiting all this time to play tennis at my age category.”
“Which category are you in?,” I asked almost as if reading from his script.
“70s division. If you’re an 80 year-old you can play in an 70 year-old category. Not the younger ones. So today I’ll be training at North Shore tennis center. Next Monday, I’ll be at my third tournament in Boca Raton.
"When did you start playing tennis?”
“1974. It’s been 43 years since I picked up a racket. I was a waiter at Joe’s Stone Crab when I picked up the racket again.”
This is when he paused and the sentences were in less of a hurry. “Everyone has a story,” he said.
“Yes they do. Everyone has a story.”
“It’s great you’re a writing, you put down a painting on a written page. You’re an artist. You’re definitely an artist. You ever do stand up or spoken word? You should. It’s exciting.”
When a storyteller crafts a tale for another storyteller, there are labyrinths worth of interpretations in the story. There were the invisible stories, on the fluidity of identities or a family’s acceptance into an America where whiteness is not a burden. There were infinite possibilities, but it was the driver who had asserted control over the story on my morning commute.
My storyteller had selected his genre, this was a classic story about two lovers. His setting, tropical Miami in the 2010s. The protagonists, a 72 year-old dreamer and his tennis racket. The ultimate happy ending, a match in Boca Raton.
