I’ve just worked a fifteen hour day. I want it all to end. I want to end it all.
I take the 8:54 train out of Metropark, hoping to get to Princeton Junction in time to catch the 9:25 bus into town. I’m in luck. We get in at 9:24.
Just as we get there, the son-of-a-bitch bus driver pulls away. In other words, he sees a whole trainload of commuters come in, then leaves a minute early. I curse as I watch him go, sympathizing briefly with every terrorist who’s ever lived.
Looking up, I see a taxi. I know the driver, rode with him a couple of months ago. Last time, as I remember, we had a rollicking conversation. The first part was about Tina Turner, women, and marriage; the second, about Chris Christie, Uber, and transportation policy. Not sure how we got from the one to the other, but somehow we did.
“Remind me of your address?” he says, in a Lebanese accent. At least I think it’s Lebanese. Could be Libyan.
Ten minutes later, I’m home, so I reach for my wallet to pay. “No,” he says, with sudden resolution. “My grandfather was Palestinian. There is no payment. The sight of your kuffiyeh is payment.” I protest, but he insists. “Good night,” he says.
Every now and then, life hands you a free ride. They’re rare, but this is one of them, so I take it. Still not sure how I feel about it. How is the sight of my kuffiyeh payment? Is it the re-affirmation of some unspoken bond we have in common, or the salve on some unhealed wound? Or both?
It didn’t seem like the time or place to ask, but I wonder about it as I drift off to sleep. Milton Friedman famously said that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” How about a free ride? Was this a counter-example to Friedman’s claim? Or an instance of it?
Policy of Truth 
The saying is much older than Friedman. But it’s used with two different meanings.
On one interpretation, it means that no one ever gets anything without paying for it. Your story would be a counterexample.
On another interpretation, it means that no one ever gets anything free without somebody else having to pay for it. This is not universally true either, but it’s true in more cases than the first version is.
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I told the story in part to draw attention to the ambiguity of the idea of “payment.” In one sense, “payment” means economic remuneration. In that sense, the driver went unpaid. In another sense, “payment” means reward, whether economic or not, and whether intended by the benefactor or taken that way by the beneficiary. In that sense, the driver claims to have been paid, even if I never intended to pay him by wearing a keffiyeh, and remain unsure what it means to have paid him that way. So all of that complicates whether the story is a counter-example or not.
I didn’t mention it in the post but when the driver saw my keffiyeh, he engaged me in a conversation about Palestine, and I told him that I was active in the divestment movement. So his “being paid for the sight of my keffiyeh” was really meant as payment to me for wearing it, itself taken as a proxy for the work I’ve done (presumptively done) through activism. In other words, it was payment for my (presumed) virtue.
I took it, but do I deserve it, even in principle? What is the relationship between virtue and monetary payment, anyway? It’s moments like this that remind me that I don’t really know.
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He may have been paid by the sight of your wearing it, but since you were wearing it anyway regardless of the trip, the trip was still free to you. Paradox! Fortunately we are a pair o’ docs ourselves and so are unfazed.
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