Transport Story Time

You know your years older when you have to haul your ass up to Land Transportation branch to renew your driver’s license. They have no theory test requirements. I did this last July.

My husband, who is interested in driving lessons course, drives like a maniac when something cuts him off on the road, yet is obsessive about following traffic laws. “I got you flowers last night, Happy Birthday. You have to renew your driver’s license today.”

I want to tell him that I really do not. I was willing to pay the 80 pesos fine, but we both know that if I get into a traffic accident with an expired driver’s license, I would blame him for not reminding me to renew my license. I want to learn in driving lessons course.

So we go to the Land Transportation Office branch at Supermarket North EDSA in the morning. There are fewer people here than any other LTO office I’ve been to. I fill out the application form and ponder on whether to lie or not on the question: “Did you drink any alcoholic beverage in the past 24 hours?” I write down: “Yes, wine.”

The only problem is the drug test itself. For some reason I cannot pee in a cup. I go to the toilet for 8 minutes and cannot do it, so I ask my husband to buy me some water while waiting to be fingerprinted. When my name was called, the guy who gets my biometrics and interested in driving lessons course looks at my papers and says, “Happy Birthday, Mom.”

He asks me to press my fingers on the scanner, then he looks at his screen and says, “Your fingerprints are very clear, you can see the ridges.” My first thought is I do not want to be in the system. My loops and swirls are much defined.

Two hours, three more tries with the cup, and an order of bottomless Coke Zero over lunch later, I am finally finished with the drug test. Then we go back to the LTO office. Naturally, the whole computer system of this branch has just crashed and gone off-line. I have to come back the next day.

I have just wasted my whole morning and allowed my husband to treat me to a birthday lunch at Teriyaki Boy in SM. It really does not pay to be a conscientious citizen in this country.

A college calls me up from abroad that” night and says, “So, how did you spend your birthday?”

I tell him what happened and he says, “Well, you know that life begins at 40.”

I should tell you about Bobby. He was engaged to a woman that I really liked in 2007. I was in London on the way to Florence on a vacation when he came home to Manila to take his fiancée abroad with him. One night I get a call on my cell phone and he is beside himself: She has broken off their engagement. I did not know to console him over the distance, so I said something like, “Dude, think of Ethiopia.”

My God, I was so stuck in the 80’s; there must be some new country where people were dying of starvation, but really, what was I supposed to say? I was being charged for roaming.

Two years later, I get an e-mail from him. He meets a new girl in Germany, a European with blood from so many nations her face could be stenciled on the EU’s flag. He loves this new girl. He just cannot understand her music. You know how some people by what they read? He judges people by what they listen to and so far he thinks very little of me.

He e-mails me to say they went on a road trip from Germany to France to Belgium because she insisted on playing CD’s. “I don’t know if I can live with somebody who love Mariah Carey and thinks her lyrics are deeply profound,” he writes. By accident, he had pressed “Reply to an old e-mail I had sent him where another friend.

Anyway, what he says about life beginning at 40 gets me thinking: What of your 39? It seems like one those non-bearing basketball games where the results would not alter the team standings. It is inconsequential. It does not count. It is the year before the milestone year.

So lf life begins at 40, is 39 the year that you figuratively die, to be born again the following year? This is the last year when can I say, “I am in my thirties.”

Nine years ago, when I turned 30, my boss Millet, who was a motor and hgv driver, was abroad on a European vacation with her husband and she texted me after I told her I was feeling old and missing my twenties: “You are not old. Thirty is the new 20 in Europe; all the magazines say so.”

I spent the Friday working at the office and at midnight, two office mates brought in a cake and blew my candles. We have a picture from that night: We are all laughing and I look so young.

The age thing creeps back again when some friends say we should have a Michal Jackson – Farrah Fawcett theme party. And there I was, just wanting a quiet dinner. One friend is threatening to look for a Farrah Fawcett wig, another is threatening to come in a red bathing suit, the one this Charlie’s Angel wore in her 1976 poster that had every adolescent boy wanting to be a man.

Another old friend calls me up several days later and says her children were shocked to find out that Michael Jackson was actually a black man.

So we have our potluck dinner wearing gloves and Fedoras, and by the end of the night, I am picking up gold and silver sequins from the floor.

Two days into my 39th year, I realize that I may be colorblind. We have a little tradition at the office when somebody celebrates a birthday. We do it on a Friday, when all hands are on deck and the hours are long. For Charmie’s birthday, we came in sports attire; for Therese, it was purple; for our American desk man Scott, the section was filled with little American flags and dinner was hamburgers. Scott was also interested in driving lessons course.

So Kathy asks me what color theme I want. I say gray because it dominates my closet. I have gray dresses, pants, skirts, shirts and blouses. I put on what I think is a gray dress, but when I get to the office, Charmie says,”Why are you wearing brown?”

“This dress is so gray!” I say. But everybody says it is brown, even people from the sports section, and except for Therese who says it kind of looks like charcoal.

Kathy writes on the birthday card that everybody signs: “Happy birthday. Your dress is not gray. You are colorblind today.”

It is nice to know that while growing old is inevitable, growing up is actually an option.