"We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab, and you had no warning. It was the last time you were going to have Lake Tung Ting shrimp in that entirely suspect Chinese restaurant, and you had no idea. If you had known, perhaps you would have stepped behind the counter and shaken everyone's hand, pulled out the disposable camera and issued posing instructions. But you had no idea."
Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York,also, New York Times Magazine.
(I'm not sure I know how to write about this essay without being corny. It's super-sentimental, and perhaps overwrought, and I hadn't read it in years — although I'd read it about a million times since I first saw it in the NYT Magazine — when I saw the book, Colussus of New York, in a store recently, and turned right to it, and it definitely made me cry. And so, because it made me cry in the middle of Bookcourt, and because it's still one of my favorite pieces of writing about New York, and because it meets the key criteria of "Reading In Cabs With," i.e. it mentions a taxi, that's why it's here.)
