Down Memory Lane

I wanted to copy a New Yorker cartoon.  I carried the magazine into my second bedroom-office and opened the printer.  Oops!   Lying on the glass of the printer in a neat little row were my Texas driver’s license and my Medicare and insurance cards. 

How did that happen? I made copies of the documents for my new primary care doctor and forgot to take them out of the printer.  That was three weeks ago.  For three weeks I drove around Dallas and Garland blissfully unaware that I did not have my driver’s license in my purse. 

For years my friend Marjorie has asked, “Are you still driving?”

I always was a better driver than Marjorie.  She gave up driving after she ran a stop sign and crashed into the side of another car.  I am still driving on that raceway, Dallas’s 635 Expressway.  

I used to be an excellent driver.  Twenty years ago I drove on the autobahn as confidently as a German, evaded crazy Italians in Italy, and avoided clashing with the French in horrendous Paris traffic.  Even more challenging were the batty Britains.  In 1996 I drove Marjorie all over England and Scotland on the wrong side of the road.  At the end of the trip, Marjorie said, “Ilene, you are an excellent driver.  The proof of it is that we are both still alive.”

But driving without a license?  How did I know no one would smash into me? 

My Hyundai has been badly damaged twice.  Both times the car was standing still.  The first time was in a parking lot at Kroger’s when a little old man in a big pickup truck tried to make a U-turn into the space next to my car.  He smashed up the rear door and fender on the driver’s side.  His insurance paid $1,000 to have a body shop make the repairs.   

The second time was last February.  I was stopped behind a small black car in the left lane on Shiloh Road, waiting for the traffic light to turn green.  The light changed and the black car moved out.  I started to drive forward, but with little more than a car length between us, the cab of an enormous truck turned in front of me from the right-hand lane.  I hit the brakes and sat still, watching in horror as the extra-long trailer came closer and closer until with a loud screech it scraped off the passenger side of my car. 

The truck’s driver was a 69-year-old trainee, trying to make a wide right turn.  He did not see me and failed to yield the right-of-way. The damage was so severe that the trucking company’s insurance company totaled my car.  It took two months to convince them to pay me enough to have the car repaired.  

Who could predict something like this would not happen again?  If it does, I will need to pull my license out of my purse to prove I can drive legally, even if I am so old I should consider giving it up.  Texas – and the World – is full of crazy, careless, and incompetent people.  Maybe I am one of them. 

Neither my driving nor my memory is as good as it used to be.  My problem is not knowing I forgot.  Until something turns up to remind me, like a driver’s license lying on the printer, I will never know.