Happy Carter
Last night, Cora Tabb of Tabb’s Cabs picked me up from the airport, along with a buoyant Sweet Briar freshman. As we were exiting the airport, the freshman announced that she wasn’t headed to Sweet Briar College, but to an address in Lynchburg, to spend the night in town with her roommate, as the dorms wouldn’t be opening until the following morning. Cora hadn’t heard of the street, and I was as lost as I’ve ever been, so it was up to the plucky young 19-year-old to guide us, with the help of Google Maps.
As she successfully led us there, confidently calling out directions, I was reminded of how utterly foreign and inept I feel in such scenarios. If it had been me navigating, I thought, we would have wound up in West Virginia. Sure enough, once Cora had dropped the undergrad off, she asked me to fire up Google Maps, to help get us back on the highway, and I succeeded only in directing us back to the house where we’d dropped off the freshman. It reminded me of the single time I took a bus in Atlanta, in my mid-twenties. Somehow, fate conspired to have the only passengers be a Japanese tourist and myself, riding the bus on the bus driver’s first day. The driver got lost and was driving through a grocery store parking lot, asking if we knew how to get to Uptown. She understood why the Japanese lady was clueless but she didn’t see how I had any business not knowing.
Soon enough, Cora told me that she could manage better without me or Google maps, and we found the way back to the highway. Earlier that day, she said, she had picked up three French students from Sweet Briar who had taken a trip to New York for Thanksgiving. Evidently it had been a disaster.
“They spent the night in the New Jersey bus station, cold and hungry, because they didn’t have any money left! I guess they thought New York was cheaper. Welcome to America.” I laughed with Cora, in the smug way locals laugh at half-witted foreigners, but really I sympathized with the Frenchies’ plight, which has so often mirrored my own in the States.
Somehow, Cora and I got on the subject of goofy names. I told her I’d had a student in China named Volleyball. She trumped that with a news report she’d heard the day before about somebody named Happy Thanksgiving Foil. There was a brief moment of confusion as I tried to understand what foil had to do with Thanksgiving, aside from wrapping up leftovers, until Cora explained that Foil was just the last name, which was a little disappointing.
Cora told me a man in her neighborhood was named Happy. Happy Carter. Was he happy? I asked. Smiles all the time, she said. But his son, who they’d nicknamed Heavy D, didn’t smile much at all. I asked her why his name was Heavy. She said that’ s just what everyone called him, for as long as she could remember.