Time: Back in April, 2016
Place: Outside the Snap Fitness gym in Richfield, Minnesota.
Nothing…….. Absolutely nothing………not even a click.
There is no worse feeling than turning the key and finding the starter on your truck has gone out,- again - for the third time. Having a starter go out on a vehicle is as frustrating as being impotent on your wedding night. I did the only thing I knew and called 10/10 taxi to give me a lift.
My taxi arrived 45 minutes later. The black driver sat large. Everything about him filled the driver seat. He had a big body, a big head, big lips, big legs, and big arms. But what I noticed most about him was his knuckles. They were huge,-no- they were enormous, and they studded the steering wheel, black, swollen and wrinkled like water soaked raisins.
“Where are you from?” I asked, knowing the answer would be an african one. “Somalia” he replied in a boom that would have sounded carcinogenic in tone if it wasn't for the fact that he didn't smoke.
“And how are things in Somalia these days?” I responded, knowing that it was a one answer question. It was like asking how Christopher Reeves is getting on playing the trombone. The answer he gave however surprised me. “ Better” he said. And as soon as the words left his lips in breathy exhalation it seemed as if he was raptured off to a distant place and time. The taxi was silent and seemed to roll on driverless for a moment. My question, like a breeze, my words like wind, seemed to blow him back to a happier time in his life. Where was he in that moment when the taxi was on autopilot? Entangled in a child hood memory? At the wedding of an old friend? Sitting by the gulf of Aden watching the breakers come in beneath the sunrise? I do not know. But where ever he was, it was a happier place and time. And even though I sat in the back seat of the taxi, I swear, I could see a brief smile cross his face, like a fruit fly in a darkened kitchen it passed, but a smile it was nonetheless.
“Better?” I asked, looking for further confirmation. “Yes, I think so.” he calmly confirmed. And for the next 15 minutes we talked about Somalia, both before, and now.
It was there in that taxi cab that my life would change, perhaps even end. And like cancerous thought, a desire to go to Somalia consumed me.
“Go to Somalia. When you get there, look up my uncle.” he instructed. “He owns the Italian Guest House in Hargeysa. “He will look after you when you get there”
“Perfect” I thought. A mission imposed upon me by a stranger, to go to meet someone I didn't know, in a country Ive never been to, with a purpose I have yet to realize and an outcome of complete uncertainty.
I would leave as soon as Ikes Restaurant was finished.
The napkin on which Mohammed wrote his uncles information.
The napkin on which Mohammed wrote his uncles information.
