chron·i·cles: Sally Forth!

"If you're able to do what you came here to do on your first visit, something is wrong."

Thank you, DMV Teller, for speaking the words in my heart: this god forsaken deck is stacked again you from the start!

Visit one: Oh, we were so sweet and naive back then. Matt and I skipped our way into the room that day holding hands, we maybe even frolicked a little, and took our ticket playfully from the Master of Ceremonies who served as the gate keeper to this fine facility. We grabbed a spot against the wall and I pulled out all my pens, I always have a million of them and noticing that many people were not as well prepared, I gave them out like flowers on a rainy day. Our number came up quickly -Oh, Joy!- and we raced each other playfully to our designated window, throwing our heads back in laughter and high five-ing people along the way. 

    "HI!" we said to the lady, "we were gifted a car and would like to register it please!" 

     She graciously accepted our forms and froze before they even hit her desk. "I'm sorry," she said. "Your proof of insurance must have today's date on it." 

    "Oh, but ma'am," we said with a slightly heavier heart. "The insurance is valid. Seeeeee......" We pointed. We used our finger to underscore the dates. We held the document before her like Vanna White. She wasn't convinced. The document had to have been issued within the last 45 days. We would have to ask Geico to send us a new statement and we would have to go home and print it out. "Is there any way we can have it emailed to you? Faxed??" 

    "It doesn't matter. You're mother's signatures don't match up." 

    "WHAT!??" This was the beginning of the end. Supervisors were called over. Eye balls were rolled. Matt's blood pressure hit the roof and we slunk out of the building feeling defeated by the government and betrayed by the world. 

Visit Two: I had something to do. Who knows what it was. But when Matt offered to go to the DMV himself, I rejoiced inside. Go for it, I thought. Way to take one for the team! It wasn't until his return did I realize that something had gone terribly wrong. He needed at least an hour on the couch before he would speak again. 

      "I couldn't get it done. They said you had to be there too. Did they tell us we both had to be there? I don't think the first lady told us we both had to be there. And you forgot to sign the title...." his voice trailed off. What additional horrors crumbled his day that day, I will never know. Some demons a man must battle on his own. What remained was a stack of forms and no stamp. It was a sad day. 

Visit Three: Yesterday. We left the city for Long Island assuming the lines would be a little shorter, feeling already a little depleted. Neither one of us had any fight left and we knew that if the DMV were to triumph once again, we would have to junk the car and call it quits altogether. The drive was far less merry than it had been in the past, and when we drove up and saw the lines stretching out the door, we lost our minds a little bit. 

    "We'll go to Southold! We'll go to the DMV there! The line will be like 10 minutes long and we'll check out that rental house for the wedding. It'll be peeeeeerrrrfect!"

    The line was not in fact 10 minutes. It was not even 100 minutes. Nearly two hours in, when the big breasted lady next to us had come and gone; after the two girls had squished in on our bench and had gotten mad at me for not putting my bag on the floor; after all the obnoxious cell phone calls around us had ended and the chatty Kathy's had faded away, we were called to our window by the only lady in all of DMV-land who is both happy with and proud of her station in life. She dissected our pile of papers with the grace of a world class surgeon. She circled names. She underlined numbers. She highlighted and stapled. Her eyes-how they twinkled! Her dimples-how merry! And then she stamped that doc approved like she were topping it with a cherry. 

We did make it to that rental property in Southold in the end and grabbed a delicious quick bit to eat (and a bottle of wine of course) before all the light of the day finally faded away. We were noticeably exhausted though thankfully satisfied. The Jeep - she is here to stay.

Someone's getting tired of having his picture taken...!