Submitted by: Mom
Topic: Going to the DMV to renew a driver's license
Word limit: 199
Here is how they get you. When you get your first driver’s license, ostensibly at age sixteen, it doesn’t need to be renewed until you’re twenty-five. That’s nine years out of mind. Between first and second license: leave parents’ house, go to college, move out of state, buy a house. When I had to get a Michigan license, that responsibility pertained to the moving checklist; I didn’t think of it as a you’re-a-grownup chore.
It was the week before Christmas, 2005. I was standing in line to renew the registration on my plates (see, that they have you do every year!), still in my coat and hat, when I tired of reading the signs on the walls and perused my driver’s license. I found the expiration date. Whoops. It seemed I would be there longer than expected, and would probably start to get uncomfortably warm in my coat and hat.
…the hat I had been wearing all day because I renew things on my birthday, which is in December, the beginning of hat season.
“Yes, you have to take it off,” the clerk sighed.
Hat-hair license (with bonus grumpy prison face) doesn’t expire for another year. Yes, I’ll forget.