BALL, FLAG, TREE…

 

Seventy-four years young, in Argentina, I now have to renew my driver’s license yearly. I won’t tell you how many years young my wife Virginia is, but we both end up in the same line at the DMV every year.

Getting your license renewed in Argentina is nothing like getting it renewed in my native US, where, in a lot of states, you can even do it by mail, and where always-on-the-road seniors would consider it age discrimination if they were asked to jump through any more hoops than the average middle-aged driver.

Well, here in Patagonia, as I say, renewal for us older drivers is yearly. And the prerequisites are numerous. First, the car you’re driving to the DMV has to have passed inspection at the Technical Verification Center. The computers there always end up turning up something or other: a poorly regulated handbrake, loose muffler, a millimeter too little tread on a tire, a faulty bushing in the front-end suspension, a stone-pit in the windshield, a less than enthusiastic turn signal…something. And until you go to a mechanic, get the nitpicking thing fixed and go back for re-verification, you can’t renew your license.

Once that’s done, you go to the DMV. There, they very amiably ask you a lot of probing questions about your age and retirement status. Then they take a picture of you, ask if it looks okay to you (let´s face it, at this age, any picture is simply as good as it gets), then they send you to another office where they give you an appointment for a few days or a week hence to take the driving test.

In the meantime, you get sent out on other missions. First, you have to go to a service payments center and pay the license fee. The cashier there also checks to see if you owe any tickets for infractions anywhere else in the country, and if so, you have to pay them before you can renew your license. You have to then take proof of that license fee back to the DMV.From there, you have to go to the offices of the local municipal traffic court. There, they scour computer records to see if you have any outstanding infractions, and again, if you do, you have to pay them. Without the traffic court certificate showing that you’re infraction-free, you can’t renew your license.

That done, you have to go to one of two medical services, tell them you’re renewing your license, and hand them the corresponding form from the DMV. You’ll be asked to wait and then will be called one at a time into a series of consulting rooms, where you’ll need to pass an eye test, a hearing test, a clinical test and a psychological test. If you don’t pass any or all of them, you can’t renew your license. 

Now, after a morning of doing all these things leading up to the medical exam, I don't know how I got out of my psych test without a straitjacket yesterday.  I had been messing around with the mechanic and technical verification for three days when we started the actual DMV process. I told Virginia after we finished with our traffic court adventure that I didn't really  want to do the medical yesterday, since it was already 11:30am and I was pretty sure the medical service closed sometime around noon.

But she insisted. We live more than twelve miles from town, and she figured that, as long as we were in town, we might as well get it all over with in one day, so all we would have pending was the driver’s test.  I had bank business to take care of before the banks closed at one, so I wasn’t very convinced, since I had to go someplace else and collect some money before going to the bank.  

Virginia, meanwhile, went on ahead to the medical service office alone. She called me while I was collecting the money for the bank, and said there were few people at the service, and that she'd already taken a turn for me so I should hurry up. It was after twelve, and, as I say, the bank would be closing at one. I said I had to get to the bank and deposit the cash. She said the medical place would close at 12:45, and I should get over there right away.

Irritated and nervous, I rushed to the medical office. I got there sweating and out of breath and prayed they wouldn't do the clinical first because I figured my blood pressure  would be through the roof. Virginia was in one of the rooms doing one of the exams. As soon as I sat down, the psychologist stepped out of her room and called my name. I was thinking money, bank, closing time, etc. when she said, “Do you have the form?”

“Form, what form?” I thought, and figured it must be something they had given Virginia at the reception desk. “Sorry, doctor,” I said. “My wife got here before me, and she must have it.”

“Who's your wife?”

“Virginia Mel.”

“Stay here, I'll go find her,” and off the psychologist  went.

All of the sudden, Virginia bursts into the room and says, “It's this form!” holding  a paper in front of my face. “The one they gave you at the DMV!” I apologize profusely to the shrink, explain that I'd been confused as to which form they were talking about, while Virginia goes back to the consulting room she'd come from. I say, “I've been running around town taking care of all sorts of nitpicking things all morning and am a little on edge, sorry.”

The psychologist says not to worry about it, just to relax, but I’m so irritated by now that I’ve been buffaloed into doing this today that my hands are shaking. The woman says, “Okay, let's begin. I'm going to give you three words, and I want you to memorize them. I'll ask you to repeat them later. Ball, flag, tree.” I nod. “Repeat them please.

“Ball, flag, tree.”

“Good. All right. What day is it?” Suddenly, I panic, “What the hell day is it??? Think, Dan, think!”

“Wednesday?” I venture. “Yes, I think it's Wednesday.”

“And the date?”

“October...October...hm...30th? No wait, October 31st.”

She nods, says, “Right date, but it's Thursday.”

“Oh okay. Sorry, it's been a busy confusing week.”

She nods dryly, with a deadpan expression, and says, “What are the three words?

Shit! What are the three freakin’ words? Wait, Dan, calm down. Think!

I say, “Ball, flag, and....ball, flag, and, um...”

“All right,” she says, “write a sentence. Any sentence that comes to mind.”

So what do I write? Hoy es miércoles. (Today is Wednesday)! And even as I'm handing it to her, I'm thinking, “No, you imbecile! It's freakin’ JUEVES (Thursday).”

Then, suddenly,  I shout, “Tree!”

“What?”

“The other word, ball, flag, TREE!”

“Oh right, muy bien. Okay now, see these geometrical figures.” I nod. “I want you to draw them freehand as exactly as you can.”

Now, I've never had any clerical ability. Maybe something to do with my more or less secret dyslexia. But it's the part of intelligence tests where I always end up looking like a moron. So, now I start laboriously sketching the two interlocked figures, and the more I mess with them, the worse they get. When I’m finished it looks like the work of a mentally challenged kindergartner.

She looks at it, hesitates, looks at me,  then looks down again and writes something on the form. Then, she looks up again and says, “What were the three words.”

“Tree...flag...um...(BALL, you freakin’ idiot, BALL!), ball.”

She nods. stamps and initials the form and hands it back to me. When I get outside, I’m relieved to see it says “APTO” (Approved). Virginia is relieved as well. “Wow,” she says, “the shrink looked worried when you sent her to find me.”

Nothing to worry about,” I lie. “I passed with flying colors.”

 

FAST AWAY THE OLD YEAR PASSES…FA-LA-LA-LA-LA…ETC.

 I can recall when New Year’s Eve was a festive occasion. That was back in another life. Back when some dangerous years of my youth, in which I thought it was unlikely I’d ever see old age, were over. Suddenly, I was middle-aged—young, but not that

young. It was, however, a rather joyous time in which I saw the future stretching far in front of me, over some endless horizon. A time of lofty dreams and ambitious goals. A time in which, to paraphrase an Eagles lyric, I couldn’t “give the reason why I should ever want to die.” 

Back then, it seemed like I might just live forever. Like I could do whatever I wanted. Entertain any abuse, accomplish any feat, because nothing could hurt me. I was indestructible. My powers of recovery enormous. My resilience exceptional. Of course, even back then, another pesky lyric was echoing somewhere at the back of my brain. A Cat Stevens stanza that went, “And though you want to last forever /You know you never will /You know you never will / And the goodbye makes the journey harder still.”

Thing is, it seemed like that, the end of “forever”, was nowhere in sight. That it might come “someday”, but in the meantime, it simply didn’t exist. Life wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t everything I wanted it to be, but it was good. And I could convince myself that “someday”, I would achieve everything I wanted to achieve. Be a smashing success at what I had fancied was my destiny.

Perhaps that’s the biggest difference between being old and, well, not old. The fact that there comes a time when you can no longer ignore the passage of time. A time when, try as you might, you can no longer convince yourself that you have a future. No expectation beyond the here and now.

I get a double whammy every year, now. My birthday and year’s end in a single month. It can’t help but keep you focused on the passage of time and your own mortality. That said, while I indeed have a few old-age complaints, I wake up most days feeling like I still have a lot of thread left on the spool. To keep that frame of mind is fairly easy when, like me, you have nothing really major wrong with you, even if you’re exhibiting a “battle scar” or two. But most days, if I practice abstraction, I can still convince myself I am only as old as I allow myself to feel.

That’s an absolute fallacy, of course, since the statistics don’t bear it out. Nor would my cardiologist. But there are always exceptions, people—even if only a few—who live happy, well and strong into their late eighties and early nineties. What’s to keep me from being one of those? Why couldn’t I, perhaps, still have a ten, fifteen or twenty-year writing career ahead of me? A career as long as the one I had as a journalist, or the one I’ve had as a free-lance translator, editor and ghostwriter. Those are the kind of thoughts that keep a spring in my step and the steel in my will to hang onto mind and body and not let them flag. Come on, my boys! Keep up, if you know what’s good for you! Movement is life. Get up and get moving, I tell myself, because it’s proof of life.

In Buenos Aires, I have an old friend (but don’t let her hear me say that!), who is only slightly younger than I am. But she’s always talking about projects for the future, about getting herself a van or motor home and living in it, traveling from place to place forever. Or about becoming a chef and running a great restaurant’s kitchen, or about moving back to the Canary Islands, where she lived for ten years many moons ago, and running a hotel kitchen there. She gets upset if I talk about our age and remind her that we’re no spring chickens. She might even say something like, “I’m not old. Not yet!”

“Well,” I say, “we’re hardly middle-aged anymore…I mean, unless you plan to live to be a hundred and forty.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she asks defiantly. “Lots of people live to be a hundred. Why not a hundred and twenty, or a hundred and forty. It could happen, right?”

I just nod, say, “Maybe you’re right. I’m just being negative. Sorry.” I bite my tongue not to ask her sarcastically if she remembered to get the five hundred thousand-mile warranty on the two hip replacements she had a couple of years back.  

No matter what tricks I might use to convince myself of my powers of longevity, in the end, it is what it is. And the fact that the mortality statistics are no longer on one’s side can be a liberating thing. I may no longer have a horizonless future stretching before me, but I do have right now. And if there’s one thing that’s great about being “elderly” (geezus, but I hate that word!), it’s that the time you’ve got belongs to you. Today stretches before me the way that near-endless future used to. But now I have no obligations but the ones I decide to accept. So, today is all mine to do with as I please. Or to do nothing, if that’s what I should decide—although that rarely happens.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t niggling reminders. Like, for instance, having gotten through a recent eye surgery and recovered almost fully the sight in that eye, I right away went to renew my driver’s license. It’s been expired for the last two months. But I’ve been driving anyway (please don’t tell anybody!), because while I could see well enough with my good eye to drive before the surgery, I would never have passed the eye test for a new license, since you have to be at least 20-20 in one eye and 10-20 in the other, and I wasn’t.

Anyway, there’s always a whole rigmarole to renewing your license in Argentina. This has been the case ever since the central government rescinded the right of provincial and municipal administrations to issue their own licenses and brought highway law and licensing under federal purview. That happened the time before last that I renewed. That time they gave me a new federal license and all I had to do was show up within a month after the expiration of my old municipal license. I also had to pass a physical and psychological test before getting the new license. That one was good for five years.

The next time I went to renew, however, there were new rules. First, I was over sixty-five (but not yet seventy), so the license was only renewed for three years. I also had to retake the driving test and, before doing that, take the physical and psych exams. That time they also required a certificate from traffic court saying I had no outstanding tickets or infractions. And, the car I was taking the exam in had to first pass a thorough vehicle inspection.

This time it’s more of the same. Early last week I started the process at the DMV, then went to traffic court and got my certificate saying I had no tickets or infractions outstanding. Yesterday, I scrambled before the year-end holiday to get a psych test, hearing test, eye test, blood pressure reading and medical interview.

The day before, I drove out to the technical verification course and asked for an appointment. Have to return for vehicle inspection next Thursday. Without that, even though I’ll pass my driving test next Tuesday (at 7 a.m. which means leaving home by six), they won’t give me my license.

I worry about this the same way I worry about the physical tests they run on me. We’ll take the test in my wife’s Renault Clio, but both of our vehicles are as much senior citizens as we are. The Clio turned twenty-five this year (bought it brand new in ‘97) and my Toyota Hilux truck is about to turn twenty-eight. We take good care of both, but extra special care of the Clio since it’s Virginia’s car. But although it’s in really good shape “for its age” and although it’s a really robust little car to start with, a vehicle that old is no more likely in car years to get a completely clean bill of health than I am in human years at seventy-three.

That said, it passed with flying colors three years ago. Hopefully it will again. The muffler’s been a little cranky and grumbling around when we’re out on the road lately, so, just in case, I also took time yesterday to go to the muffler shop and have the muffler and tailpipe changed. An ounce of prevention…

All of this I can take in stride. It’s all part of the rich tapestry that makes up Argentina’s legendary bureaucracy—what my late sister-in-law used to refer to as “the Soviet”. But the cruelest cut of all was when they told me I’d have to do all of this once a year from now on. Seeming to want to be humiliated, being a proverbial glutton for punishment, I made the mistake of asking why. The answer was immediate and anesthesia-free, and said with a combination of disbelief at my naïveté for asking and of pity for my predicament (because no one young ever thinks he or she will ever be old): “Because you’re over seventy.”

Try as you might to ignore this obvious fact, to get up feeling you’re as strong and capable and “together” as ever, when a third party points it out, rubs your nose in it, as it were, and goes as far as to tell you that, no matter how good you feel “for your age”, you can be legally discriminated against simply because you’ve reached a certain stage in life, that you can, in a word, be “protected” from yourself and have others be “protected” from you, it hurts. It hurts no matter how strong a stuff you’re made of.

But life, fortunately, goes on. When this process is finally over with next week, I’ll be able to forget about it until the end of next year. And once I shake it off, I’ll once again be able to get up in the morning and pretend I’ve still got all the time and freedom in the world.

Some weeks are better than others. Some days are brighter. That’s a fact of life. And in the end, there is still always something to celebrate as the old year ends and the new one begins. If nothing else, that we’re still here to see it and to experience whatever it might have to offer for as long as we manage to keep waking up every day. In the end, that’s the miracle. That, after all these years, all the miles, all the danger, all the close calls and hard times, the illnesses and recoveries, the good, for me, still far outweighs the bad.

Today has been yet another one that I could call my own. Tomorrow will take care of itself. In the meantime, I’m still here, and loving it.