Whether being dirt poor, which I’ve been, or being drenched in wealth, which I haven’t, there’s always time to learn and grow from the world around us.

Some lessons are sad, some bizarre, and some are edifying, yet one should never pass through a day without learning something new.

I wasn’t a night taxi driver in Spokane for long, but lessons of all types flew at me practically nonstop.

On the sad side was an incident when I was called late at night to the biggest hospital in town to take home an elderly, totally disoriented man. When we arrived at the apartment complex he lived in, there were possibly eight identical living units only differentiated by numbers on doors.

It wasn’t that the apartments were outdated, but lighting was poor; not the best of scenarios for a disoriented, aging man. The address given me, the taxi driver, did not include which unit number coincided with his “home,” hence we literally, after he led me the wrong direction, approached door after door until he found one where his key fit.

No one was there when he arrived and I, probably like everyone else in his life, drove away.

My thoughts in retrospect were that he likely had no insurance and was sent home to die.

The bizarre came one night when inside the bus/train station, probably returning from the john en route to my cab, when this dude walked through the front, glass doors exuding an air of nastiness. I honestly try to avoid making quick judgments because I have no authority to judge anyone, but this guy was special.

I walked by him and, seriously, felt relief that he wasn’t a passenger of mine.

But fate felt the need to teach me that night and, about an hour later, I got a call to pick up someone at a brand new pub that had just opened across Sprague from the bus/train station.

And it was ominous when I walked into that pub about 11 at night and saw only one customer in the entire joint, the same snarly dude who now had called for a taxi.

His first instruction was to take him to the nearby 7-11 so he could pick up a half-rack of beer. That was easy and I was grateful that he, sitting in the back seat, didn’t test me by trying to pop one. Instructions, delivered in less than a friendly manner, soon became harder to fill. He said the bartender had told him about a motel that met his incredibly low weekly budget and told me to go there. The fact he neither knew the name of the motel nor its location was problem enough, but my experience to date as a night taxi driver in Spokane dealt with nightly, and not weekly rates, and my inability to comply with his demands fueled anger.

When we finally reached an inexpensive place of lodging that seemed amenable to his demands, the sign outside the inner-city door said to ring the bell. He did, and a voice from inside told him to go away.

This really ticked him and I was there for him to vent on.

He railed so hard that, bent on unloading him anywhere, I acceded to his demands and stopped the meter while praying for relief.

The edification came at the last sight of the man when, half-rack under his arm, he happily was hopping up the stairs of a motel (possibly two miles away from the station) that I consistently deemed the “worst” motel in all of Spokane.

Jabberwock II columnist Rocky Wilson is a reporter for the Chieftain.