I was rather proud of my neat, tight, three-point turn.

“You’re facing the oncoming traffic,” the driving tester pointed out, wresting the steering wheel from me and putting us in the correct lane. “You could have caused an accident.”

Things went downhill from there.

Some painful minutes later, we pulled up back into the driver’s testing spot, and the tester quietly informed me why I would not be receiving my driver’s license that day, noting in particular the car I had failed to notice in traffic, which I am still wondering about, because, well, I guess I failed to notice it.

It seemed like such a simple thing back when we lived in the city: Get a car and renew my driver’s license. People did this all the time. Everyday folk, people without 12 credits in graduate school, bought cars, drove cars, parked cars. I had had driver’s licenses in three states, beginning at 16 in Illinois, moving on to Maryland and finally New York. Then our Volvo’s windshield was smashed by rowdy teenagers; we hadn’t had the money to replace it and the car went the way cars so often do in New York, a luxury of people in the suburbs.

We regretted it daily as the people on the subway competed to spill coffee on us while keeping the other commuters loudly informed of both their doings and their political opinions (always quite wrong), but that was just the way things had to be. So I let my license lapse, too much trouble to renew it with small children and no need for it, until now.

When our oldest child enlisted in the Marines, we wanted to see him graduate from boot camp in South Carolina. So we took a small inheritance and bought a car.

The problem being, of course, that we are not car people. The person I relied on for car advice was the person who left us the small inheritance. So after months of discussion and seeking information and getting more confused rather than less, we bought the first car we looked at, a used Subaru with a need for minor work, which, as far as we know, could have consisted of the mechanics reciting incantations while throwing Cheetos at the engine. Five hundred dollars later, we were almost ready. 

Then I set about renewing my license. It turned out that the three licenses I had before had no bearing on getting a new license: I had to start as if I had never had a license, beginning with the learner’s permit. Everyone gets learner’s permits. People whose children didn’t get into the gifted and talented programs at school get their permits. I could do this. I could go to the DMW, fill out the forms and get mine.

HA. OF COURSE NOT. I thought that, having had both a previous driver’s license and a non-driver ID issued by New York State, I wouldn’t be an “original” applicant, and won’t need to show a social security card, which was stolen the previous summer (along with the non-driver ID), and maybe if I weren’t, there would be a way to be informed of this BEFORE I stood in line for ONE HOUR patiently thinking, well, this should be OK. 

But this is not a problem—everyone gets their social security cards. People without IQs in the 99 percentile were walking around contentedly with their social security cards firmly in hand. I could do this. I had to go to Social Security to replace the card, wait for it to come in the mail, and then return to the DWV, thinking all the while that they’ll have made up more and ever more interesting rules by then.

The Social Security card never came.

I returned to the Social Security office, stood another hour in line. The clerk was very apologetic; there had been four others just that day whose cards had not arrived. She suggested that if this card didn’t arrive, I come back in three weeks with a different address. By moving OUT of Brooklyn, perhaps.

By this point, I was sorely tempted to.

Meanwhile, we had been learning daily the amazing wonder of owing a car in the city, from the $4,000 cost—not a misprint—of being considered “new insurees” in fraud-prone Brighton Beach, to the tickets we have racked up from just having a car in Brooklyn and not dedicating as much time to it as we do to earning the rent money.

I still didn’t have my license. The car took us to and from South Carolina for boot camp graduation, and to and from North Carolina to visit our kid in his training.

Then he got assigned to Hawaii.

We thought about selling the car. Shouldn’t have been a problem.

People did this all the time.