Taxi Driver

I was in my early twenties when this photo was taken. It was the image that was on my taxi license. I have that plastic enclosed document somewhere among the many photographs that attest to my existence during the now almost eight decades of my life. They are in cardboard boxes, acid-free archival sleeves, in drawers, and storage units. I often think that one day I will begin an organization campaign that will be ruthless in discarding duplicates, blurry pictures, and those so unfaltering that I will save the people in them, including myself, from a painful encounter with their ugly selves.

But this I know won’t happen, because any time I start looking at photos, time stops and hours later I have only examined a few, get lost in the memory of where I was at the time, open associations to adjacent and distant experiences, and never part with any of these treasures. Yesterday I opened a metal box that rests in my clothes closet on a shelf in the back. It

contains personal items, and I wondered if my hack license would be there. It wasn’t. The name Max Elkin, Attorney at Law, is engraved on the cover. Max was a colleague, a friend of my father’s. The box is one of only a very few objects that I still retain of him more than sixty years after his death.

I had a dream overnight where I was in an apartment on the second floor of a pre-war building that was both in the Bronx where I grew up and on the exclusive row of Central Park West buildings where I have my office. It was apartment 2C. I would not have remembered that detail, had I not come upon my father’s death certificate in that box, and the paper attested that he died at 12:10 am on June 23, 1963. It was signed by a Dr. Weissman. I was there.

As I look at me in the taxi license photo, maybe five years after I stood with my sister a