Everything is free now

Ok it isn't, but this blog is.

I took the driving test today — or is it “my” “driver’s” test? You know, the one 16-year-olds do to get their license. To say I have been avoiding this is the most hilarious understatement, even though I chanted to myself my excuses as I walked through the doors at the DMV. My mom died, I practiced saying. Maybe I don’t have to say how long ago (18 months). Before that? The pandemic, probably. Work. Babies. Somewhere in there I still had my Florida driver’s license, renewed again and again via mail, which was often, because I kept losing it. I lost it in college, in Indiana bars. In New York, of course, where I lived for eight years but never did the work to switch it over. And boy did I have time, then. It would have been easy I think, just a form or a visit. Then we moved to Oregon 10 years ago and I would lose the FL license too often to be able to take it in to the Oregon DMV and then so many years passed, and it expired for real, and the window was too long to renew by mail.

Somewhere in here, 2022 or so, I was having some kind of crisis and my therapist laughed a little bit and said, “Have we ever talked about how you have ADHD?” No, we had not. (Still haven’t; not there yet.)

My sisters in chaos I need you to know if you don’t already that when you avoid this license task long enough, you have to literally revert to the year 2000 and take the driving test all over again.

I finally faced this reality in 2023 when I was assigned to profile Jenny Slate and I wanted to do this so badly that I took the knowledge test to get my learner’s permit, and didn’t take the driving test in time for my flight, so I took a lot of Massachusetts Lyfts (a grand tradition, probably) and then avoided the driving test for another 2-3 years, as one does.

The profile, if I may, came out great. I have what feels like a sick love of writing profiles, but only of weird genius women who I genuinely respect and am totally willing to debase myself for. (Now that I’m in my 40s I can confidently say I am in what must be the top 1 percent of people who can conversationally debase myself in front of famous people and later write about it.)

Which brings us to today. Imagine a series of having the wrong insurance form and running back to the car and it’s 100 degrees and the guy and I are misunderstanding each other but thankfully he did not question the fact that I drove myself there despite being only at learner’s permit status. Also blessedly did not question the fact that the car I was driving was registered to a person who died in Jan 2024. He handed me a pamphlet to read about not being nervous, which I skimmed because I knew I was already a DRIVER and had been for 25 years, legally or not.

He told me to pull my car around to some roundabout where the tester would meet me. I wanted to be like “You mean drive the car alone without a trusted adult???” but didn’t because that might have screwed me. I had made up this story in my head about how my husband had driven me to the DMV but then left me, and the car, to, um, walk somewhere nearby. Thankfully I didn’t need this.

I sat in the roundabout and worried about whether I should have the car on or off and if she would need my dead mom’s registration and/or the insurance I had to pull up on my phone (she would) and if it was ok for me to take my seatbelt off to scramble around shoving forms and my wallet and my phone in different car slots, my hands actually shaking by the time she approached my window.

She was wearing a big cardigan in 100 degrees and was probably my age but with her kind eyes and her sad office drag she seemed to exist outside of time. I fished all of my documents from the slots and prayed that while she stared at my ins. card on my phone my friends didn’t text me about how I was going to go to jail for driving without a license.

She told me to turn the car on. I obeyed. She walked forward so she could see the car and told me to turn on my right turn signal. I looked at the two black sticks, one on either side of the steering wheel and my mind went blank. Which one was the blinker? I knew it by muscle memory but muscle memory had fled the scene. I hit the right stick and the windshield wipers sputtered across the dry glass. I swallowed, turned them off, and hit the left stick, recovering quickly. This had to had to happen all the time, right? I did all the other tricks and she got in and in a very calm voice began ordering me around, like the world’s tamest domme. “I want you to pull forward and take a right at the intersection.” I inwardly debated whether to tell her I was a full adult woman who was bad at “minor details” but who could in fact drive, and whether this would make things seem better or worse for me. We drove in silence, and this was simply too awkward and too easy. All right turns.

“You know,” I ventured, my eyes on the road, “I do know how to drive.” Did she get this all the time? “I mean, I, uh, well, I am here due to a series of mishaps. Not because this is like my first time driving.” My dead mom has these leather seat covers on the fabric seats of her Subaru that I have never bothered to take off and despite the fact that I was blasting the AC (cf: this woman’s fucking cardigan), my ass and thighs were sweating at this point like they had never sweat before.

The tester nodded and said, “Ohh, okay,” or something, not exactly expressing approval. But she gave her orders more casually from then on.

“I’m still really nervous though,” I admitted, which was true. I was extremely focused on using my blinker, but then all I could hear was the blinker, and I wanted really badly to turn on some music, and the sound of the blinker was possibly going to make me insane. I started getting paranoid that there in fact was a law about using your turn signal when you’re still seven cars deep in a turn lane and probably won’t even make the light. There should be.

“Oh I work at the DMV and I wouldn’t want to take this test,” she offered, which pleased me. Who would? I kept wanting to turn to her and suggest we cut the shit.

“Must be crazy with the REAL ID,” I suggested, being sure to look over my shoulder when I switched lanes. Now that I had announced myself as a Driver the tenor changed, and I wanted us to graduate into collegiality. She expelled air and was like, “Not to mention they closed the downtown office AND we’re down two people,” and I was like “Oh jesus christ,” then wondered idly if I should apply to work at the DMV.

(Did I mention I got laid off last month?)

I feel like I’d excel at tolerating people’s terrible personalities and would relate to their bureaucratic incompetence. The pay is probably bad but is it worse than writing?

The woman instructed me to pull over on a neighborhood road. Oddly intimate. And then reverse. I had to put my arm on her headrest to look backwards as I backed up — an oddly paternal move, it felt like, in the age of the backup camera. We laughed about that and she said the drivers always feel awkward about that one but she’s used to it. (hell yeah, inside knowledge.)

I asked her if she improvised the driving routes and she was like oh my god no, it’s always the same, there are two routes total. She wonders if the people who make the routes ever actually drive them (mild criticism). I appreciated this comment. “No I chose this route because I don’t feel like going on the freeway,” she said.

“Me either!” I told her, but I was preemptively disappointed because I would have LOVED to incorrectly think that the test included driving on the freeway (shouldn’t it?) but that my tester skipped it because she immediately saw how skilled and talented I was that she cut the test short, requiring no further proof.

Then I remembered or realized that this wish was less about the DMV that what I longed for from people working in publishing or media. Like perhaps at a certain age or skill level you could stop having to argue your own case. Maybe in a different industry. Not in art, not really or not fully. And not in the DMV.

But I tell you, when that woman opened the passenger door of my mom’s Subaru and saw that I had, indeed, parked within the white lines at first try, it felt damn good. “Thank you for a beautiful drive,” she told me. I passed. I missed one point, something about stopping at the wrong place at the stop sign, information I did not retain. I was told to go back inside the DMV and stand at the red carpet where someone would call my name and get me my driver’s license.

The red carpet!! “You must be Meaghan?” a woman said, and I grinned, briefly entertaining the possibility that word of my 99 score had spread like wildfire among the employees. Probably it was more about my time slot.

She asked me if I wanted to update my height and weight and we had a nice knowing chuckle when I said no, which I assume was something about being an aging woman and lying about your weight? She said my hair was “sandy” which was fun, and she sent me off like a graduate to go get my photo taken.

I left there with my driver’s license, current address included, feeling a sense of accomplishment that ran almost alarmingly deep. Champagne? Drive-thru diet coke and fries? When was the last time I had such good news. Dustin said he had kind of assumed I would forget I was taking a test and start picking up my phone at red lights as a reflex. Thankfully I had put my phone in the backseat before the test for this very reason.

My identification as a winner was so immediate and so deep that when a few other friends sent follow-up texts to ask if I had passed I felt almost insulted. Me? The champion of the DMV? Who has been driving for 25 years and didn’t even have to go on the freeway? “I passed with flying colors!” I wrote, and everyone cheered. It was not pleasant, I have to tell you. It was like someone watching you shower or brush your teeth, looking for mistakes. But it was also easy. In some ways this is the worst combination. In times like this, though, we go through the drive-thru and come home after and take a triumphant nap.