He wasn't going very far; just to a fast-food restaurant. He'd have driven there himself, but he backed over a tree stump in his yard and tore up his fuel tank. That's why he called the taxi.

He's 82 years old; looks and acts a few years younger than that. He keeps busy, working on cars. Old cars. What would be considered classic today. He's never worked on one of those newer cars with fuel injection and he's not about to start now. He's a retired Navy man (even drove a government taxi during part of his hitch), and in a financial position that many people would kill to get -- a good-sized pension, and his home is paid for. A widower for two years, he doesn't cook for himself, ergo the fast food. He eats out all the time. "I can afford it," he says.

It was during our conversation that I realized why I drive a taxi. See, and all this time I thought I was just doing it for the money. Not so. I like talking to people and listening to them. I'm a collector of stories. Everybody needs a hobby, just like everybody has a story. In a way, it's a perfect job for a former journalist.

Like most collectors of stories, I've always liked the works of Studs Terkel. Studs was the consummate collector; one of his best-known books was built around him asking random people a rather mundane question: Tell me about your work. I've also enjoyed books by Peter Jenkins (who walked across America back in the 1970s) and William Least Heat Moon (who drove aa four-corners trip in his van). Both of them wrote about, well, the stories they collected from their travels.

We collectors are probably a little too easy to pick out in a crowd, and it sometimes gets in the way. Even in the most ordinary of circumstances somebody would be beaing my ear. I'm serious about that part. More than once, while I was doing something requiring concentration -- even while playing a gig with a pickup blues band at a veterans' hall -- a relative stranger will be telling me his life story.

I'm telling you, we collectors must wear badges. Or something.

While listening to my passenger, I remembered a conversation I had with Leon, back in California about 20 years ago. I ran across Leon while I was on the road, and he was backing an auto hauler onto his property. The hauler was loaded with antique cars -- a Model T, a Model A, and a few others. It turned out he rented cars to movie companies, and his lot had a bunch of them. A convertible driven by John Ritter in one movie. A taxi driven by Mr. T. in "D.C. Cab." The conversation wasn't limited to that, either. Leon told me of George Wong, a real character who was the last resident of Riverside's Chinatown. Of Simon Rodia, who built the Watts towers in L.A. basically because he could. A fascinating chat among the parked cars.

I told my passenger about my conversation with Leon, and he laughed. "I got a call from a guy in California," he said. "He wanted to know if I had another convertible for him."

As any good collector will tell you, one good story always begets another.