The Rideshare Chronicles: Retired Lesbian on Birthing Happiness Through Art, Creation

“Maybe if people didn’t feel the pressure to make something amazing, more would use art as an outlet. Which would be wonderful. Because creating births happiness, even if you didn’t produce a piece that’s worthy of museum display.”

I’d picked up Nancy*—who is off to Kazakstan to explore ancient ruins with 15 other retirees—in front of San Francisco’s Embarcadero. A cream-colored cloth hat covers her short crop of sandy brown hair, lending her the appearance of a cute mushroom as she waited next to her luggage.

Military patterns cover her felt suitcase. Instead of putting it into my trunk, Nancy takes it with her into the backseat. For most of the ride, she keeps her arm slung casually over it in the same nonchalant way of a teenage boy’s around his girlfriend when watching a movie on her parents’ living room couch.

Queer Love in the 1960s

Nancy says she’s taken many trips since retiring—both solo and with groups, like the one she’s about to embark on now. She and her wife used to be avid travelers before her wife passed away several years back.

I love hearing lesbian couples’ meeting stories—Especially from the days before dating apps existed, when avenues for doing so were far more limited—and it’s not every day that the opportunity to converse with a queer woman from an older generation presents itself. When Nancy broaches the subject though, I’m in for the treat of hearing one.

“We met at a bar in the 60s. Shirley* was playing the piano,” Nancy recounts. “I approached her drinking a rum and coke, told her I was looking for someone to give me piano lessons, which she ended up providing. Music instruction and a life together.”

First came the tutorials, then came the falling in love, followed by the telling of their parents. Later came the pushback from family members and friends, the moving in together anyway, the cat and the furnishings and the building of a life, the occasional disagreeing and momentary breaking apart, only to always return to each other to work on the relationship they’d begun that night inside *Sapho’s Bar.

Art for Art’s Sake

As we drive alongside the bay, she talks about her former job as a fourth grade teacher, which she’d been in for 37 years. She recalls enjoying art class with her students, sharing that she is a proponent of creating just for the sake of it.

Nancy pauses to take a sip from her purple Klean Kanteen, which her passport is attached to with a rubber band.

“There’s no need for every stir-fry we prepare or slice of peanut butter toast we butter to be outstanding. What’s most important is that we feed ourselves,” she remarks.

I relate to this. My Lyft Tales blog is peppered with illustrations that look like they were drawn by a child. Yet I don’t have a 7-year-old cousin; those were done by yours truly. I scribble and color them because doing so is cathartic. They help me process my experiences. They also encourage me to not take myself too seriously. They reconnect me with my childish, playful side that doesn’t always have an opportunity to show its face in the majority of the day’s more routine drudgery. They provide flexibility to my rigid, linear thinking, making me more receptive to creative ideas and alternative ways of seeing.

Not to mention they’re a lot of fun to assemble.

As I merge into the lane beneath the sign that says “International Terminals,” Nancy tells me that she once loved pottery. Though she used to practice it daily, by now she’s shifted most of her attention to tending bonsais and Japanese flowers. 

The Imprint Our Ride Left

After dropping Nancy off at the International Terminal, I reflect on our ride.

It reminds me of the magic of crossing paths at unexpected moments. We exchange ideas about how life once was compared to how it is now. We form a bridge between the old and the new, weaving threads between earlier generations and more recent ones. Conversing with Nancy, I’m prompted to remember that we’ve always existed, and will continue to.

Maybe some day we’ll live in a Pantopia where heterosexuality isn’t assumed and queerness is normalized to the point that it’s rarely if ever considered compelling fodder for conversation. People will see woman-woman pairings, men-men pairings,  genderqueer  folks with transgender with agender people, and not bat an eye. This will render lesbian spots like the one Nancy described obsolete and unnecessary.

Maybe a Lyft flying car pilot, when speaking to an elder queer woman passenger like myself, will ask with incredulity: “Being gay was actually a thing to talk about?”

And like Nancy did during our ride, I’ll pass along my own lesbian dispatches from the 2020 era.

I’ve written before how little factoids gleaned during my rides with passengers become tied to the physical spaces we drove through as they shared them with me. Images taken from moments that I lived through only in my mind (while riders with stories as layered and varied as San Francisco’s distinct neighborhoods recounted them to me), interpose themselves (somewhat awkwardly) onto the backdrop of the landscape that surrounds us.

Returning to these spaces re-conjures those details. 

Now when I round the corner onto the Embarcadero and glimpse the Bay Bridge extended out like a silver accordion under the cloud-speckled sky, I also see Nancy on her tour with the 15 retirees. Her hands are on her hips. Her round, black-rimmed glasses frame her attentive eyes as they all take in the ruins. 

Sometimes the memories and the present scenery even interact with one another.

Joggers running next to the waterfront, led by enthusiastic dobermans, cross paths with Nancy’s adventure group in the mountains. The two topographies collide (incongruously in real time) like two icebergs in my mind’s choppy ocean landscape.

Cars crash into each other beneath the International Terminal sign, trying to avoid a pottery wheel that’s obstructing the road. Nancy sits calmly at the wheel—completely at peace as the clay spins through her hands and the vehicles around her spin out of control. 

In honor of Nancy, I encourage you all to go do something that births happiness—even (or perhaps especially) if you don’t consider yourself a master of the craft.

*Names changed for confidentiality.