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She was my first ride on Saturday morning.  People ask me if I have any idea where I am taking people when I am ‘dinged’, the answer is: Nope.   When I arrive to pick up a passenger the app tells me where we are going,   This is to keep drivers from ‘cherry picking’.  That morning Denver International Airport appeared as her destination, which for a Lyft driver Is like getting three bars  on a Blackhawk slot machine.   The reason I like DIA rides is two-fold.  1. They pay well and 2.  Often in a 38 minute ride…

I hadn’t been driving for Lyft more than a couple of months when my son Mateo said to me, “You approach this like you are playing your favorite video game.”  Well, it is a fact that I am the ONLY person I know who ‘Saved the Princess’ on GAMEBOY Tetris in 1995.   I was privileged  to have a couple of gamers, when I lived in The San Luis Valley ask me, “So there is a princess on Tetris?”  I literally burned up a GAMEBOY playing that stupid game.   The year of my retirement I made this declaration “I…

I was doing one last ride on this past gorgeous Sunday afternoon.  I picked her up near Denver University.  Her destination was the Brown Palace.  I immediately did my “Oh my, another privileged non-Native invader off to spend her Daddy’s money.”  I don’t know about you, but I am in an ongoing conversation with my internal judgmental jerk and my gracious and accepting lover of life and people.  It soon became apparent that I was WRONG.  Early in the course of the conversation, she shared that she had grown up in the neighborhood in which I had picked her up.…

I picked him up in the parking lot of a miniature urban strip mall. One that has the oldest Starbucks in Denver and a bakery named “La Sensual”.  This is the bakery that I wondered into within days of moving here 20 years ago, from the San Luis Valley.  Try to imagine someone who had spent the last 11 years living on an acreage raising pigs and geese, walking into a bakery thinking he is headed for the scone counter, only to be met with cakes designed in all sorts of ways to celebrate human “private parts”.  After 20 years…

I picked Dave up at Historians Bar on South Broadway.  We made a left turn which put us smack to the south side of the church I served for nearly 18 years.  He said, “That is my favorite church building in Denver”. “Well,” I joyfully said, “I was the Senior Minister there until 2015.”  “You are Pastor Pumphrey!  This is amazing.  About six years ago I would walk by the church almost every day.  I read your name on the marquee and adopted you as my imaginary pastor.  I can’t wait to tell my buddies.  We would talk and I…

It was a Spring afternoon and I picked her up at a convenience store in the heart of downtown.  She got in the front seat and said “I need to go west and then all the way back east. I hope that is okay?”   I said “You’re the boss.”   We headed up Speer Blvd, which was going at the pace of a checkout lane at King Soopers on a holiday weekend.  She was getting visibly agitated and out of nowhere said, “I have to get to my needle exchange program.”  We were half way there when she asked,…

People can change.  I just returned from a gathering of preacher types at my seminary, Phillips Theological, which is now in Tulsa.  I have been going to something called Phillips in Oklahoma since 1967, that would be 50 years, YIKES!!!  Every year in January they host something called “Remind and Renew”, which is both a reunion and an opportunity to engage in  powerful theological, cultural conversations.  There are a handful of folks there who started school with me in both undergraduate and graduate school.  There were a couple of the awkward moments where you think you recognize the face and…

I haven’t worked in a job that included tipping since 1981. In 1979 I suddenly became a single parent and needed a second income. I soon learned about tipping as a part of making a living. I was the Senior Chaplain at The Enid State School during the day, and three or four nights a week I worked as a waiter at the Peppermill steak house. It was a fascinating life as I moved from a profession where I lead a team of eight, who provided pastoral care to over a 1000 people, with every variety of developmental disabilities, to…

I picked her up in Capitol Hill a little after six in the morning.  It was a fairly long ride out east.  I thought I recognized the address and asked, “Do you work at the medical complex?”  She replied very directly, “No, I work at a treatment center in the detox unit.”  It was the 2nd of January and I commented, “I bet this was a very busy weekend for you.”  “You have got that right, it’s kind of hard to watch.”  “How long have you worked there?”  I asked.  “Almost 5 years” she replied.  “Wow, you are truly committed…

After nearly 14 months of picking up total strangers and inviting them into “Red” to take them to or from their home, an airbnb, DIA, school, their job, the 5th bar of the day, or the Denver Zoo, I continue to be amazed as to the ‘Magic’ that can happen in the micro-space of a very ordinary SUV.  Just yesterday I was taking two young men from a South Broadway bar, which was a couple of blocks from the church I served, out to a hotel in Old Stapleton.  They were college students from The University of Tennessee who were…