“So, where are you guys from?”

“He’s from here,” I said, “and I’m from Jersey.”

“Jersey, huh? 201, 551, 609, 732, 848, 856, 862, 908, 973.”

“What about the new ones? There’s 856…” My mom’s area code since she moved is 856.

“856, replaced 609.”

Close enough.

“And where are you from?” he asked Dan.

“Newton.”

“The Garden City.”

I was getting into this. “And I’m from the Garden State.”

“That’s right,” said the cab driver. “Exit four, NJTP.”

“Exit three,” I corrected, but I was wrong — it is exit four.

“You from Cherry Hill?”

“Close to that.”

“I requested four Beatles songs on this station,” he said, “but none of them have come up yet.”

“Which songs?” Dan asked.

“Rain, I’m Only Sleeping, I Am the Walrus and Run For Your Life. Do you know any of those songs?”

“Yeah,” Dan said.

“Rain, 3:02, I’m Only Sleeping 3:01, I Am the Walrus 4:37, Run For Your Life 2:18. What was the first Beatles song over three minutes?”

“Tomorrow Never Knows,” Dan guessed.

“Ticket To Ride,” he said. “3:12.”

The fare came to 6.50, but I gave him 10.00.

I am going to be preparing a vegan meal, so I am turning to the cookbook I own which contains a lot of complex and interesting vegan meals: The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen, by Peter Berley.

The recipes are all excellent, but some of his advice is kind of dubious. He recommends “real, unrefined, coarse gray Celtic sea salt” which contains “the eighty-four mineral elements originally in the ocean” because these elements “harmonize with the human body’s own fluids.”

Conscientious cooks may also want to note the following sidebar:

The next time you drain water from a sink, notice the direction it flows — this will tell you what the natural force of the water is where you live. Water spirals in a counterclockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. I like to maintain this harmony by stirring foods steadily in the natural direction.

Uh, okay.