Soft Serve

This short summer school day is still throwing me off and there are only eight school days left. It appears I will not adjust after all. The mornings are not the problem, we seem to have figured that out, but now I’m having trouble timing my errands with the bus arrival in the afternoon. Especially when he’s early (grrrr) as he was yesterday. Given our ambitious undertaking yesterday, missing the afternoon bus by 30 seconds was pretty impressive. (Remember that Maggie has a nurse with her so she’s safe.)

Yesterday Tim and I headed to the DMV, which is always a treat, and perhaps even more so on the Monday after a three day weekend. I had to replace the stolen/lost/disappearing handicapped placard and Tim needed a copy of his clean driving record to show potential employers. We arrived around 11 and stood in line #1 to obtain our numbers which would show us how long we had to wait.


The guy behind the counter in line #1 was a big gruff looking fellow. He looked at my completed paperwork for the placard and asked “Is Mary (Maggie) with you today?” “No,” I responded, “she’s in school this morning.” He just harrumphed and gave me the #. It crossed my mind that he was indicating I would have a problem but it was clearly not something he was going to discuss with me. His job was to distribute the numbers. I could deal with my paperwork problem AFTER I waited in line. My number was B033 and Tim’s was G099, which means nothing until you saw they were on B002 and G060 at the time. Ok, time to get comfy. Tim, wasting no time, went across to the market/deli and applied for a job while he waited.

The DMV is only about 5 minutes from here, but at noon it became clear that I wasn’t going to make it. Maggie’s bus comes at 12:30 and there were still 17 people ahead of me in the “B” line. Tim’s line was moving fine, though. He was about two people away. I got back into line #1 and told Mr. Gruff I had to go meet her bus and asked if I could do this by mail. He said yes, but it would take awhile. I then asked for an appointment to come back but he said the first appointment was mid-July. He then looked at me straight on and said, “how old is Mary?” I said, “she’s 15 – and she needs total care, so I have to be there when she gets off the bus.” Mr. Gruff suddenly softened and said “follow me”. He took me right up to a window and told the woman to wait on me next.


Yes, that’s right. Special treatment! At the DMV! By a scary looking guy that I thought was messing with me. I got the placard before Tim got his driving record. I felt pretty good about the world and vowed to stop misinterpreting people.

Also I changed Mr. Gruff’s name to Mr. Softy.