When I slung on my impractically thin fall jacket and dashed down the street to Safeway in pursuit of some starchy supper, I had no idea I was about to be embroiled in a complex interweaving of reluctant cab drivers and questionable-looking would-be passengers.
It began when I was halfway through the Safeway doors. A very cheerful man with a very thick Jamaican accent was laboriously rolling his wheelchair out the exit doors as I was coming in. He yelled across to me to go out and hold his cab for him. I ran outside, to find that his cab already had someone in it. The cab-driver drove off. I turned around to see the man (Leonard) rolling down the slope of the Safeway parking lot, thanks to someone who had given him a slightly too helpful push. I ran out, caught him, and rolled him to the next available cab.
My ability to understand English spoken in accents other than my own is embarrassingly low. I could not understand Leonard, and apparently neither could the cab driver. While the cab driver was trying to understand where Leonard was trying to go, a very drunk woman staggered up to the driver's window and began speaking loudly in a voice that was even more difficult to understand than Leonard's. The driver, now accosted by two apparently unintelligible passengers, rolled up his window and waited for the next able-bodied, sober person who needed a lift home.
We all went back in to Safeway. By now I had begun to get the gist of Leonard's accent. He'd been at Safeway since the morning, trying to get a cab. Phoning hadn't worked out for him (unfortunate but unsurprising, judging from my inability to understand him in person), and he couldn't get from the store to a cab fast enough to snag one before another passenger did. Think you've got trouble getting a cab in this city? Waiting out in the cold for one was out of the question; he didn't even have gloves. We went through the phonebook together. Every single taxi in the city was busy. Just then, who should show up but Leonard's three children! Problem solved. One of the women ran off to get her car and I went off to get my carb fix.
I was almost out the doors when I was accosted by the inebriated Geraldine--the woman from before. She waved me over and tried to converse with me in speech that I found incomprehensible. After my third "Hmm sorry? You want a cab to where?" I began to feel quite idiotic. Leonard and his family were still standing by the doors, waiting for their car to arrive. I began wondering what they would think of me. Who is this strange girl running around trying to get cabs for people? Why can't she understand that woman? Why is she only buying chocolate bars and pierogi? Call that a supper? Did she just call that woman her grandmother? What is she playing at?
Figuring that Geraldine's problem was partially due to her slurred speech and partially due to the drivers' hesitance to pick up a single, drunk, old woman dressed in tatty clothes who was clutching nothing but a quarter and a dime in her hands (this was misleading; she did in fact have money for cab-fare in her pocket. It just looked like she only had 35 cents to her name, but the cabbies were fooled), I decided to use my charismatic charm to convince a cabbie to at least roll down the window for us. I waved one down, and after I explained that my poor grandmother was feeling unsteady on her feet and needed a ride home, he was happy to let her in.
Whew.
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