Uncle Nacho was a cabbie for more time than most people are alive. He had a booming voice and roaring laughter that was felt more than it was heard. He was already an old man when I was a kid, and he did not seem to age one day until the end. I last saw him one month ago, three days before he died.

Cancer may have gotten the best of him, but sadness never did. He outlived his wife and daughter, and at the end, he’d fall asleep with his eyes open, and could no longer close his mouth, but he was still making jokes and telling us off.

In front of my house there’s a long, unkempt patch of land at the ridge between the lanes. An old elm that grows there casts a solid shadow on a soft spot of grass. Every day when I’m going back to work after lunch, there’s a cabbie lying there. I never see him pull in, but he’s always there when I leave. He parks his cab illegally in the middle of the road, lies down under the tree and takes a fifteen minute nap.

I have never talked to him, but as far as I’m concerned, from three thirty five until ten to four in the afternoon, that cabbie is the happiest man alive.

I sometimes sit by the window and watch him there, napping, and I like to think that somewhere, uncle Nacho has found a solid shadow by a patch of grass, and is lying there, with a smile on his face. Somewhere.

— sergio on November 05, 2004