Special K and I had to make a quick trip last week to Oregon to take care of some family stuff. While we were there the fact came up that my kid sister needed to get her government ID renewed. She’d gotten older and it had expired.
She said in order to get a new one she needed a copy of her birth certificate. That – according to her - was safely stored in a file box, which she then proceeded to bring into the living room so we could find the paper we needed.
But we couldn’t locate it – she went through it twice and I went through it another couple of times.
We simply couldn’t find it. To make matters worse this was all happening early on a Thursday afternoon and the clock was ticking – cutbacks had forced the DMV (where IDs get renewed) to scale back to a four-day workweek, they wouldn’t be open the next day and Special K and I were scheduled to fly out on Sunday morning.
That’s when someone came up with the idea that maybe a passport would work – it has a picture on it and is good enough to get you through security and onto an airplane.
So my sister quickly called the DMV and asked if a current passport would work.
The good news was that yes, it would be acceptable. The bad news was that – when I asked my sister where her passport was – she pointed to the file box we’d been searching through for the past 20 minutes.
It all turned out okay though – we hadn’t seen the passport on our earlier explorations, probably because we weren’t looking for such.
It seems the mental image I had in my brain as to how the birth certificate should look was of how I have mine stored away, which it turns out was quite different than the way hers was folded and the type of envelope it was stored in.
This time we finally found both the passport and the birth certificate.
****
On the plane heading north on Sunday morning there was a young guy sitting across the aisle from Special K and I. He must have been a medical student because he was going through a big textbook with a highlighter.
I could see that the book had pictures of brains like you’d see if they cut one in half. He was a pretty fast study too. He was whizzing right through that book and the highlighter was flashing across the page – marking a couple of lines, skipping half a page and then marking another line.
Pretty soon it dawned on me that you might rather have your brain surgeon who learned every word of his lessons and didn’t just pick and choose what parts he felt were important in the textbook.
**** While down in the U.S. we rented a car for a few days. The downside of that is coming home and getting into your own ten-year-old model that rattles and doesn’t smell as nice.
These new cars have so many buttons and doodads on them it’s a wonder there aren’t more accidents caused by distracted drivers just trying to figure out how to operate the blasted things.
It makes you nervous going down the road knowing for instance that they have put a button on the end of the turn signal lever and you really, really want to push it but you have no idea what’s going to happen if you do.