In the second middle drawer of my dresser is a little
envelope of sadistic torture.
I have all my drivers licenses since I was 34 years
old. My state doesn’t ask you to turn in
your old, expired license when you go in and renew. I’m a selective hoarder, and for some bizarre reason I save
all of my old drivers licenses. I have them
all together in an easily accessible place.
Sometimes I pull them out and look at them. Every time I do this, it kills off a little
of my inner joy. It’s not healthy. It’s weird.
At first I thought it was fun to watch my hairdo change
over the years. The best picture is on
my 34 year-old license. That’s probably
why I kept it. I read somewhere that most
of us think we looked best in our early 30’s.
The drivers license pictures are also a record of my
battle with contacts versus glasses. The
pictures go contacts, contacts, glasses, glasses, contacts with very red eyes, and
back to glasses.
I recognize two favorite outfits in the pictures. One is a pink and white striped top that I
always wore with pink slacks. That was
probably the last time I ever wore pink slacks.
The other is a black and white dress.
That was back when you wore a dress to get your drive’s license
picture.
But the most interesting record is the record of my
weight. The weight on my 34 year-old
license is what I hoped I was down to before I got married. I had all four wisdom teeth taken out in the
month before my wedding (long story – maybe a blog someday), and I might have
actually weighed that for a day.
On all my licenses I miraculously stayed that weight through
four children until I hit age 48. I
remember that license renewal vividly.
Kind of like how people remember getting hit by a car or fired from a
job. I filled out the paperwork and
handed it to the clerk.
I thought she was a nice person until she asked, “Do you
want to update any of this information?”
Looking back at her steadily I bravely lied, “No. It’s fine.”
(Technically that wasn’t a lie. I really didn’t want to update anything.)
“Really. Are you
sure?”
I stared back and felt my world crumbling around me. Then, “No.
Yes. Add 20 pounds to the weight.”
But she was really, really mean and apparently not
satisfied. “That’s it?”
The mean clerk tilted her head down, pulled her glasses
to the end of her nose, and looked back at me.
But I ignored her and dug in my purse like I had just lost something
very important.
She was still staring when I looked up. That made me mad. I snapped back, “That’s the change.” She continued staring, oblivious to how close
I was to slapping her, but 20 pounds was all she was going to guilt out of
me.
When I got home, I wailed to my husband, “In one hour I
aged six years and gained twenty pounds!”
I don’t have to renew my license for three more years,
but there’s always that fear of running into another mean clerk. Of course, maybe by then the weight on my
license will be accurate. I can hope, can’t
I?
As Andy Dufresne wrote to Red in Shawshank Redemption, “Hope
is a good thing, maybe the best of things.” Of course, both Andy and Red were skinny men.
How do you always make me sit at my computer and laugh out loud?
ReplyDeleteIn a few years you'll lie about the eye test too.