She looked frantic and desperate, and I asked her who she needed to call. She told me she needed to call a taxi to get to Skyline High School.
"I'm taking my SAT exam," she said.
Damn.
"Whoah," I said, "What time does it start?"
"7:45."
It was 7:22.
We rushed over to the attendant's vestibule, where a list of taxi cab numbers was taped to the window. I began calling them one by one. When a voice finally answered and I said I needed a pick up at Fruitvale Station (made infamous by the 2009 murder of Oscar Grant by BART Police officer Johannes Mehserle--check out the movie Fruitvale Station; it's heartbreaking) the man on the other end, sleepy-voiced and flat, said, "I don't have a car in the area."
My own heart started to race as the rest of the numbers rang and rang with no answer.
Finally, as I dialed the last number on the list, the young girl sang out, "there goes a taxi!"
I watched as she hurried across the street to where a cab had just pulled up with another close behind. "Good luck on your exam!" I called after her.
I kept watching as she bent down to talk to the driver. I got the sense this was the first cab she'd ever taken, as she misunderstood the driver's motion backward and scampered over to the taxi parked behind. The first driver got out and called her back, pointing to his own back seat. She hopped in.
I was teary as I watched the taxi pull away. All I kept thinking about was how different her SAT experience must be compared to so many other kids in the area. I imagined well-tutored and test-prepped children tucked into their beds early the night before, awoken at sunrise and given warm, hearty breakfasts, chauffeured over to their respective testing sites with entire spare hours during which they would go over a few extra rounds of vocabulary flash cards, just for good measure.
I thought about the people out there who deny the notion that some are born with distinct advantages, which increase their odds of succeeding at things like school work, college admission, graduation, etc.
I was feeling something akin to pity for her.
By the time I was on the train and headed to work, however, I started to contemplate the idea of "success" in broader strokes. The SAT is not a required test. If it's too much trouble for you to make it happen, you don't have to. But there this young woman (who couldn't have been older than 17 and looked even younger) was, making it happen. She had either taken the train or walked to the station with instructions or a plan to call or look out for a taxi, which would get her to where she needed to be. I don't know if public transportation was her usual method of getting from place to place, but that morning it was. Whatever it took to get there, she was going to do it.
I was also thinking about my own assumptions, which caused me to have pity in the first place. It was entirely possible that she was well-tutored and test-prepped and had been awoken early to a warm breakfast. She could be the daughter of wealthy people who, for some strange reason, had sent their daughter off to take a taxi to her SAT. Who knows? The point is that the more time I spent on that train, thinking, the more strongly I was convinced that the young woman I encountered was exactly where she needed to be, doing exactly what she needed to do.
The value of resourcefulness, after all, cannot possibly be overstated.
Maybe her journey had indeed been a rough one...maybe not. But by the time I got to work I was all full of cheers for this girl I had encountered. 'Go ahead, girl,' I thought, and pictured her on her graduation day, fresh-faced and full of dreams and with the experience navigating the so-called real world that would help her make them come to fruition.
As a parent, I struggle all the time with whether or not the help I lend my son is empowering or enabling him. Of course I want to give him everything. But when I think about all the things that helped give me the tools to capably handle my own grown-up life, I see they have a lot to do with what wasn't handed to me...what wasn't made easy for me. It was those things for which I had to reach and work and strive--the things I had to figure out.
I didn't need to worry about that young woman's outcomes. What she deserved was a congratulations and a tip of the hat.
I think she's going to do just fine.
