How my father steered me the right way
June 14, 2008
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Stuart Laidlaw
LIVING REPORTER
Enough in tips to pay for a couple of coffee breaks and a lunch at Morrison's diner.
For my dad, the year he drove a cab in Kingston, Ont., that was all he needed from his customers. Oh, sure, he told me more than once, if he were extra friendly, chatty and charming, he could make more, but that's not the kind of guy he was.
Blame 25 years in the army. Blame two wars. Blame the Scottish persona, if you will.
But it was more than that.
Better, he told me, to be true to yourself and get what you need than to change who you are just to make a little more money.
Money's not worth changing for, he said.
It's a lesson he taught me one summer when a confluence of events meant that I spent most of June and July the year I was 7 or 8 in his cab. It's one of many lessons I've drawn on since.
I was the youngest of my family. The next youngest, my sister, was eight years older. That meant that when she started to get summer jobs, I was still too young to be left on my own all day, and my mother worked full time.
So I rode around in the front of my father's cab. Over the squawk of the dispatcher's radio, he taught me the such tricks of the trade as the how to calculate the fastest way across town, or how to read traffic.
Hidden behind the tricks, however, were deeper life lessons, lessons I now to pass on to my own kids 40 years later.
Like the fastest way across town.
Kingston in those days was basically shaped like a square. The city's main drag, Princess St., cut a perfect corner-to-corner route across the city, connecting the train station to the downtown. Looking at a map, Princess should have been the fastest way across the city. It was certainly the shortest, but it had traffic lights at almost every block.
My dad taught be another route, skirting the northeast corner of the city. It was by far the longest route – but with almost no traffic lights. And where there were traffic lights, there was always the option of turning right on a red.
Princess offered no such options, and a red light meant dead stop. That made the northern route faster, even though it was longer and more complicated.
The route changed a little with each trip, depending on where we hit red lights and where we hit green. But rarely did we ever stop moving – and, in the cab business, if you're not moving, you're not earning.
When I was tempted as a young man by radical politics, it wasn't treatises or essays that persuaded me to think otherwise. It wasn't debates in the library or the pub. It was my father's northern route across town.
The fastest and best route, he taught me, isn't always the shortest.
There's more. A good cab driver, he told me, doesn't just drive fast. He reads the traffic.
Here's a scenario. You're on a four-lane road. You go into the left lane and speed past a couple of cars, only to come up behind a guy waiting to turn left, bringing you to a stop. All the cars you just passed, and maybe a few more, speed past you on the right, and you are forced back in line behind them. The result, for all your earlier speeding, is that you're worse off than when you started.
The lesson? Think ahead. Plan your strategy and know what others are doing before you barge ahead. You'll be better off in the long run.
I'll never know if my father realized all the deeper lessons he was teaching me or how important that summer was to me. He was never a particularly profound thinker; he didn't finish high school until he was in his 50s. And for a good part of my life, he and I didn't get along all that well. So I never asked.
When I started driving cab part-time early in my journalism career – small-town papers don't often pay well – my mother chuckled at the turn of events but I could see the sadness in my father's eyes.
He didn't want that life for his kids. I remember asking my father once that summer, feeling guilty over lunch at Morrison's, whether he had to give up on his minimal tips policy to feed me the days I rode in his cab.
"Are you kidding?" he said. "A blond-haired, blue-eyed boy in the front easily doubles the tips."
Use what God gave you, in other words.
Stuart Laidlaw is the Star's Faith and Ethics reporter.
Toronto Star