“Here for a learner’s permit?” The clerk smiled from her kiosk at the pair standing before her. “How did you guess?” the woman replied, as her daughter smiled. They presented their documents, took a number and looked out over the crowded benches at the Department of Motor Vehicles for a place to sit.
“Now serving … Bee-sixty-five …” intoned a disembodied female voice. “At counter number … eleven.”
Tinny rock and roll drifted down from grids in the ceiling over ranks of citizens so varied and colorful that the tableau looked like an illustration from a textbook on multiculturalism. A full-figured gal strolled through the crowd in a spangled T-shirt bearing the slogan “I love my boyfriend.”
“Now serving … Gee-one-hundred-sixty-two.”
Minutes ticked by. Two girls with skinny jeans and spotty faces slouched together on a bench, whispering. A man walked past holding the hand of a beautiful child whose round cheeks and feathery hair made you want to check her back for cherub’s wings.
“At counter number … twenty-five.”
More minutes ticked by. An agitated female was complaining to the man beside her: “… my license is suspended, so I can’t …” She paused to clap a hand over the mouth of the little girl squirming in her lap.
“Behave,” she said, and turned her attention back to the man.
Through the din, Bob Seger could be heard crying faintly from the ceiling: “Don’t try to take me to a disco! I’d rather hear some blues or funky old soul. There’s only one sure way to get me to go! That’s playing old time rock-and-roll. … Yow!”
All at once, the woman and her daughter heard their number. A moment later they found themselves across a desk from a pleasant man with the accent of the Indian subcontinent. He pointed at a screen: “Is your name spelled correctly?”
The girl looked at the screen and nodded. Her mother looked, too, and while gazing at that impersonal screen she suddenly remembered the highly personal process of choosing that name, 16 years ago. Like other expectant parents, she and her husband had flipped through baby-naming books, made lists, tried various combinations, laughed about disastrous nicknames, considered family names, and eventually decided. When the baby was born, she got the name.
Now here she was, signing it on the first serious document of her almost-adult life. A moment later, she had disappeared into a room where she’d take a preliminary driving test.
Back on a bench, the woman suddenly perceived a pattern in the crowd. Here was a father and his adolescent son; over there, a mother and daughter. Another pair, and another! The room was, in fact, filled with parents who had brought their children to get permits. In a matter of months, if all went well, the children would be able to drive independently, just in time to leave home.
A thought struck the woman with sentimental force: Like a maternity ward, the DMV is a place where momentous rites of passage are just the humdrum stuff of every day. Just then a voice spoke over her shoulder, and she turned to see the flushed and triumphant face of her daughter.
“I passed!”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
