There is a group on Facebook to which I belong called Main Line Memories. It is for people my age who want to share pictures of the Main Line of Philadelphia, where I grew up, as well as experiences, first jobs, etc. Someone posted about the Bennet Cab Company, which brought back a flood of memory. I rode the Paoli Local home from school, walking to Merion Station, riding the train to Bryn Mawr. I then took a taxi home almost every day from 6th through 11th grades. I never paid; we had an account, to which I presume driver's tips were added, which was paid every month. It was in a Bennet Cab that I encountered the mystery of TOT MI PO MI (pronounced taht my po my)
The taxis had a meter. Every meter I ever saw was made by Rockwell corporation. It had a flagged arm that started it. The fare was read out in big numerals in the middle of the meter. Along the top were a set of smaller counters, much like a car's odometer. They were labeled TOT MI, PO MI, UNITS, TRIPS, and EXTRAS. I had nothing to do on the rides home, and I studied that meter, trying to understand the function of those counters. I noted that they changed slowly or not at all. TRIPS did not change during the ride that I could observe, but I suspected it recorded the number of individual times the meter was rung. EXTRAS and UNITS I did not understand at all. They never seemed to change, and were much lower numbers than TOT MI or PO MI. I eventually learned the number of miles from the station to our house, and that TOT MI changed that same number. I deduced that it stood for 'total miles', but I also noted that PO MI changed exactly the same amount. I couldn't understand why two counters increased by the same number during rides but were not the same total number. Clearly PO MI was different, but what on earth was PO MI? My unsatisfying conclusion was that it was 'possible miles', but that made absolutely no sense to me. How could a taxi record impossible miles?
TOT MI PO MI came to be a source of almost mantric meditation when I was in taxis as a child. Every meter I ever saw had the same counters, even in New York, and it was a familiar, if indecipherable, code. It joined the many oddities of life that I did not understand. A teacher who caressed my butt and said "What an ass". A man who out of the goodness of his heart, according to my mother, paid for a young secretary's abortion. Stopping at another young woman's apartment to say hello on the way home when I went to work with my father. Being sent outside when my parents went to their bedroom. Uremic poisoning. The Jungle, the name my mother gave to the undeveloped land around our home, that was filled with unname but dangerous insects, dogs, wild animals, criminals and possibly space aliens.
This was the world of childhood, of latency. Fantasy and play mixed with school in a world unaware of adult things like sex, or bills, or sickness, or money money money money. TOT MI PO MI was one of the prime mysteries of childhood, on a par with Santa Claus, a mysterious device that counted things I couldn't understand.
The movie Philadelphia has two beautiful songs. One is Philadelphia, by Springsteen, which is the theme song that was nominated for an Oscar. The other was Philadelphia, by Neal Young. I suspect the producers asked several artists to submit songs, and got two so good they did not want to pick one, and so used both. Young's song, ethereally and elliptically referring to love and sexual awakening, includes the lines "When we were boys and girls, and the secrets came unfurled." This is the best description I have ever read of the awakening of sexual awareness that comes with adolescence, and which is followed, like the steps in puberty, by awareness of money, bills, greed. In short, awareness of Pleasure, and of Evil. Every person experiences, like Skynet, the moment of self-awareness. We have the Neo experience. We see behind the nominal facade and find the mechanics, the motivators.
We see the world is not fat men in red suits coming down chimneys but our parents going to a store. The teacher is a gay pederast. No man pays for an abortion unless he fathered the child. No married man visits a young woman's apartment except for one thing. And one day, I rode a taxi as an adult.....
The meter did not say TOT MI PO MI. It said TOT MI PD MI. And suddenly I knew that, like everything else in the world, the taxi was a money-making machine. The meter recorded total miles and PAID miles. The two ran together while the flag was tripped, but when the taxi dead-headed somewhere only TOT MI ran. It let the company know what proportion of mileage was actually compensated.
So, like Santa, the mystery had an ordinary, commercial explanation. Beyond childhood latency, however, TOT MI PO MI has another meaning. Why was a child going home in a taxi every day? The answer is both parents worked, an oddity in those days, and I came home to a variety of housekeepers, sitters, or nothing. When younger, I was always the last to be picked up from school or activities, by a parent who was harassed by work and a sick husband, and for whom picking up a child was too obviously a chore. When older, I performed to rooms of strangers, not family members. No one greeted me at airports or train stations, nor were there happy, tearful send-offs to college or med school. I took taxis. TOT MI PO MI is a powerful, wordless spear to an eternal space of loneliness and abandonment that is, along with rage, at the heart of me.
I had not thought about TOT MI PO MI in some time. Meters have changed. They are digital, and only flash the price, which is outrageously high now. There is no flag, only a button, and no mysterious counters. No TOT MI PO MI. That phrase, however, more than any single word, captures childhood, and loneliness. As adults we try to recapture latency, to be free of bills, lust, fear, despair. To be free of loneliness and abandonment. We use alcohol, trips, lovers, jobs, something to pull us out of the miasma. There is no return to ignorance, however, and no relief of the abscess of the past. There is only the daily effort to live meaningfully, to help someone, to relieve the suffering of others, and in so doing to perhaps relieve your own. TOT MI PO MI.
Ted
The taxis had a meter. Every meter I ever saw was made by Rockwell corporation. It had a flagged arm that started it. The fare was read out in big numerals in the middle of the meter. Along the top were a set of smaller counters, much like a car's odometer. They were labeled TOT MI, PO MI, UNITS, TRIPS, and EXTRAS. I had nothing to do on the rides home, and I studied that meter, trying to understand the function of those counters. I noted that they changed slowly or not at all. TRIPS did not change during the ride that I could observe, but I suspected it recorded the number of individual times the meter was rung. EXTRAS and UNITS I did not understand at all. They never seemed to change, and were much lower numbers than TOT MI or PO MI. I eventually learned the number of miles from the station to our house, and that TOT MI changed that same number. I deduced that it stood for 'total miles', but I also noted that PO MI changed exactly the same amount. I couldn't understand why two counters increased by the same number during rides but were not the same total number. Clearly PO MI was different, but what on earth was PO MI? My unsatisfying conclusion was that it was 'possible miles', but that made absolutely no sense to me. How could a taxi record impossible miles?
TOT MI PO MI came to be a source of almost mantric meditation when I was in taxis as a child. Every meter I ever saw had the same counters, even in New York, and it was a familiar, if indecipherable, code. It joined the many oddities of life that I did not understand. A teacher who caressed my butt and said "What an ass". A man who out of the goodness of his heart, according to my mother, paid for a young secretary's abortion. Stopping at another young woman's apartment to say hello on the way home when I went to work with my father. Being sent outside when my parents went to their bedroom. Uremic poisoning. The Jungle, the name my mother gave to the undeveloped land around our home, that was filled with unname but dangerous insects, dogs, wild animals, criminals and possibly space aliens.
This was the world of childhood, of latency. Fantasy and play mixed with school in a world unaware of adult things like sex, or bills, or sickness, or money money money money. TOT MI PO MI was one of the prime mysteries of childhood, on a par with Santa Claus, a mysterious device that counted things I couldn't understand.
The movie Philadelphia has two beautiful songs. One is Philadelphia, by Springsteen, which is the theme song that was nominated for an Oscar. The other was Philadelphia, by Neal Young. I suspect the producers asked several artists to submit songs, and got two so good they did not want to pick one, and so used both. Young's song, ethereally and elliptically referring to love and sexual awakening, includes the lines "When we were boys and girls, and the secrets came unfurled." This is the best description I have ever read of the awakening of sexual awareness that comes with adolescence, and which is followed, like the steps in puberty, by awareness of money, bills, greed. In short, awareness of Pleasure, and of Evil. Every person experiences, like Skynet, the moment of self-awareness. We have the Neo experience. We see behind the nominal facade and find the mechanics, the motivators.
We see the world is not fat men in red suits coming down chimneys but our parents going to a store. The teacher is a gay pederast. No man pays for an abortion unless he fathered the child. No married man visits a young woman's apartment except for one thing. And one day, I rode a taxi as an adult.....
The meter did not say TOT MI PO MI. It said TOT MI PD MI. And suddenly I knew that, like everything else in the world, the taxi was a money-making machine. The meter recorded total miles and PAID miles. The two ran together while the flag was tripped, but when the taxi dead-headed somewhere only TOT MI ran. It let the company know what proportion of mileage was actually compensated.
So, like Santa, the mystery had an ordinary, commercial explanation. Beyond childhood latency, however, TOT MI PO MI has another meaning. Why was a child going home in a taxi every day? The answer is both parents worked, an oddity in those days, and I came home to a variety of housekeepers, sitters, or nothing. When younger, I was always the last to be picked up from school or activities, by a parent who was harassed by work and a sick husband, and for whom picking up a child was too obviously a chore. When older, I performed to rooms of strangers, not family members. No one greeted me at airports or train stations, nor were there happy, tearful send-offs to college or med school. I took taxis. TOT MI PO MI is a powerful, wordless spear to an eternal space of loneliness and abandonment that is, along with rage, at the heart of me.
I had not thought about TOT MI PO MI in some time. Meters have changed. They are digital, and only flash the price, which is outrageously high now. There is no flag, only a button, and no mysterious counters. No TOT MI PO MI. That phrase, however, more than any single word, captures childhood, and loneliness. As adults we try to recapture latency, to be free of bills, lust, fear, despair. To be free of loneliness and abandonment. We use alcohol, trips, lovers, jobs, something to pull us out of the miasma. There is no return to ignorance, however, and no relief of the abscess of the past. There is only the daily effort to live meaningfully, to help someone, to relieve the suffering of others, and in so doing to perhaps relieve your own. TOT MI PO MI.
Ted
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