Taxi stories......

1

It was my first day of driving a taxi and I was very nervous, to say the least. I stood at Sheraton hotel taxi stand and was hoping that nobody would come to my cab. What if I don’t know the address, what if they are in a hurry and I get lost? What if they find out that it was my first day of driving a taxi? My heart was pounding. I wished to disappear behind the steering wheel. But it was too late; there was no going back. It was my turn and the four passengers got in my cab.

“Hi”. I just uttered out of my mouth.

“Heeello, we would like to go to Hyatt hotel”.

They are three men and a woman, Ohhh…Germans, no doubt, I think. The accent is obvious.

“Weisst er auch wohin er fahren muss?” the woman asks the men in German, wondering “if he knows where to drive?”

It’s my time, I have the better cards in my hand, get almost too excited about it, aim for the deepest impact and say: “ Natuelich weiss ich wohin ich fahre!” An outcry. Followed by a open mouth, I watch and enjoy. She is shocked that I say “of course I know where to drive”!

The men are not easily moved, hold their position, but there too surprise and barely closed open mouths. “Wow! A dark haired cab driver in America who speaks German!” I think they must think. They were attending a convention of a sort in our small big city and they spoke German! You can imagine how relived I was after finding out that my very first costumers in my new American job were Germans.

I speak German, and am not bad it even though I am neither German nor German looking.

My anxiety has transformed to relief, the tension is gone.

You ask how that’s possible, but I have to plead for your patience then you will certainly find out later all about it. For now, it’s sufficient to say that my knowledge of German saved my day, my first day at my new American job. Later, far more than proficiency in German was required to do my job of driving a cab and my passengers to their destination. I knew from that first day that this job will be interesting, that there were waiting many more open mouths, including my own, for me.

Obama is the Presidential Candidate of the Democratic Party

It's a truly historic day for the people of the United States and the world. Obama's nomination as the Democratic contender for the president of the United States mark s a new beginning in many respects.
He is young, intelligent, well educated and well spoken, and he is the first African American to be a presidential candidate. He represents hope and change for a country that seemed to forget it's fundamental principles.
Remarkably, he has shown on many occasions on the campaign trail that he understands and respects these founding principles of the nation. Those principles, conceived by a few brave and intelligent white man, have the remarkable quality to envision a future not as yet on the thinking horizon of their authors. They had the fantasy and the will to think beyond their own social, religious and racial existence. They thought, what if..., and so have created the perhaps best possible of the systems on earth.
It is now up to Obama, the Democratic Party and the voters to complete this historic reinvention of a nation. America will certainly benefit from the change as will the world. Those of us who live here know that United States is a better place than it's image around the world suggests.

Change is possible, and it doesn't need to be one towards bad........

San Diego Wildfires 2007

October 23, 2007

San Diego, CA

San Diego is again engulfed in flames and smoke of the wildfires. Actually, it’s the whole of Southern California, but San Diego County is the most affected. It is déjàvu, only with less lively images than the previous fires.

I’m sitting on my veranda in the back of my small house in the middle of San Diego, Qualcomm stadium, a major evacuation site, is a 2 minute drive from my house. The images and sounds pouring over us through TV are too surrealistic to be comprehended, smelling the smoke and feeling the fine burned particles in my nose and my throat are more believable.

The sun came out today and it was a warm day, but the light had a matt glow to it and the air was filled with a dry heath. I hear that more than half a million people are evacuated, and more then a thousand houses are burned to ground. Even though I’m hearing throughout the day the traffic noise, most public places, such as schools and colleges, are closed. I stayed with my children at home, watching TV and waiting.

There are many fires in the county, burning simultaneously. Fire and wind playing with people and landscape their game of seek and hide, once flaring out here, dying down there, blowing west, and then to the east. Santa Ana winds, representing one of the two destructive elements, the other being fire, seem to be the stronger ones then their counterparts in this yen and yang of nature, earth and water.

The fires are fiercer this time, so is the human response to them. It’s remarkably calm and coordinated what people and authorities display and do. There are firefighters from all over California, and from other states, fighting as if it were their fires! Sometimes, they are standing in the middle of a burned landscape of what have been houses, trying to dose water on the one or two houses that are not burned to ground yet. It’s truly heart wrenching. The governor was here yesterday and today, giving comfort. The federal government responded remarkably fast. It sent military tanker airplanes which were operating all day today.

It’s amazing that sometimes tragedies bring the best out in people! Most people who lost their houses in the fire respond with such a dignity and calm that one truly feels their loss as one’s own loss. And anyway, these natural disasters violently put human existence in a perspective that allows us for moments to look at us in more a human way, to see each other as sitting in the same boat. We could and should learn from the nature that violence should not be the work of humans, and that nature doesn’t discriminate when it hits us!

Stories....

Hey everyone, it's a pleasure to talk to you. Storytelling has been always a dream of mine. Knowing that I'm not good at it has prevented me from trying it publicly. But I don't want to wait anymore. Encouraged by the the beautiful blog of my friend Maya and the persistence pushing of my family I take this dangerous step: To let flow, or rather sicker the drops of thoughts....
To search for meaning in realm of nature seems to be in vain. As humans, we have to postulate. Human history seems to me to be constituted by stories, some good, some bad, but all just stories, or that is at least how and what we know about it. Evolution has endowed us and our imaginative ancestors to use thinking and language. To look for meaning outside of its human and individual context would be perhaps disappointing, but language had taken us somewhere, where?, I don't know. But I, for myself, would not exchange the ability to think and to utter words and sounds for any of the the other "wonders" of life and universe.
They are drops, not waves and streams, of thoughts that do really happen inside this mass of living stuff, called brain. It hasn't giving me more of the poetic power of the other fellow humans which has made me feel at home in this tiny human house in an undisclosed location of the universe(s), but they are drops anyway of the same nature... Looking forward talking to you.