He presses her against him with big, merciful arms, and she continues to squeeze herself into him. Clinging on as tightly as she can without letting go.

Anita Shabtai

YOU PROBABLY DON’T GET WHAT the big deal is about striking up a conversation with you guys. What’s so difficult about talking to a taxi driver, you just put one word after another and toss them into the air, right? Probably seems like the easiest thing in the world to you. But I’ll have you know that for some people it ain’t that simple, coming up with something smart to say off the top of your head. I’m not talking about everyone, obviously. For some, it just pours out of them like water. My dad, bless his soul, was a real expert, I’ll tell you. You’ve never seen anything like it. He hadn’t even entered the taxi yet and was already talking, and wouldn’t stop until he got out. And don’t get me wrong, Dad wasn’t normally much of a talker. He was actually the silent type. He’d return from the printing house every evening and barely say a word.

Any homework? Dinner? Shower?

That’s how he’d talk, stingy with words. How do you explain it? That in taxis he’d talk when everywhere else he was so quiet? What can I tell you, when I was a little girl I thought maybe every person had only a limited number of words they were allowed to use a day, and that Dad preferred cashing them in all at once, getting it all out. Today I’m not so sure. All I know is that every conversation always started the same way. Dad would hand the driver a note with the address, and sigh. The driver would ask “Why the long face?” and Dad, with the few words he knew in Hebrew, would tell him about Mom. About the cancer.