Highlight of St Louis: "Hey man, you do the math."

The taxi driver was the most colourful thing I encountered in St Louis. I saw him mostly from his back profile, a chubby balding red-headed freckled guy in his mid-40s. He was only driving the taxi until his translator's license came through. Then he'd be able to work as a court translator, for Spanish law cases. "They pay 350 bucks per day, plus expenses and I never have to be away from home overnight," he said. "That's key when you have teenage girls, you've gotta be around all the time." He had more than just one or two teenage girls, he had a house full of women. He'd worked in Honduras for 20 years as a translator for the US State Department. He married a Honduran woman and they had three daughters. They oldest of these was college age, so he'd moved back to St Louis to send her to a local college. They'd bought a big old house in the suburbs, with loads of room for everybody. That was a fortunate decision, because subsequently, the apartment belonging to his wife's two sisters burned down, so they were now hosting the two sisters, each of whom had two daughters. "Hey man, you do the math ." Well let's see. Wife, three daughters, two sisters in law and four nieces. That's ten women versus one guy. "They've even turned the cat against me, because they can scratch his ears with those long-assed nails of theirs." "Spanish women," he explained. "They're not like white women, they're like black women. They don't talk, take turns to talk. They shout at eat other all the time, at the same time. You stole my favourite shoes, you ate my dessert, you hog the TV remote and on and on and on. Man, it does my head in. This traffic is worse than I thought, but we should make it on time. You're flying Delta? So anyhow, I ain't denying that there's always food in the house, that it's always clean and that your laundry gets done. But it's the noise, the constant shouting. So, I blocked off the top floor as my 'office.' When I say office, it has a TV, a computer and a fridge. Nobody goes in there but me. My wife, she's good about it. After 20 years she knows that sometimes, I just want to be alone. She won't allow anybody up there. Not to watch soaps, not to check e-mail, not to put nail varnish bottles in the fridge. Nothing. It's my office and she keeps them out. So I'm driving the taxi and the only hitch with the translation thing is that, well, I have a conviction in Honduras. I mean, it's gonna sound pretty bad. I have a conviction for human trafficking." He was right. That did sound pretty bad. "But it isn't really bad. Some guy wanted to break out of Honduras and go to El Salvador, so I gave him a ride in my car. The certification body said that shouldn't be a problem, seeing as how not many people want to break out of the United States. But it's preying on my mind, you know what I'm saying?" And that was the highlight of Saint Louis, Missouri.