Chance

On a night unlike many others, I took a taxi home. I had approached the first cab I saw outside of the bar, but the driver didn’t have a credit card machine and I didn’t have cash. The second cab I approached didn’t want to go to my neighborhood. The third driver agreed to it.

It was indeed a night like many others, except on this particular night, behind the wheel sat a woman, a rarity in Boston as in most places in the world. I told her where I was going, and the cab took off, headed away from campus and toward home.

I was looking out the window, watching the passing winter scene, when my driver reached for her music and turned it up…Arabic music, but with so slight an accent that it was impossible to discern its origins.

I asked.

she replied, without a second’s pause.

My heart skipped a beat. What are the chances? Home for less than twenty-four hours and missing Beirut, and all of the people contained within it, terribly, and who do I stumble upon but a female Lebanese taxi driver who doesn’t even flinch when I, Wilma Flintstone for all intents and purposes, speak Arabic to her.

I wish I could say there was some revelatory statement to be made, something about fate or chance, but the fact of the matter is, it was a night like any other night…Except that on this particular night, when I was missing Beirut with every inch of my being, my cab driver happened to be the only female Lebanese cab driver in the entire city of Boston.