While driving home yesterday from the establishment where Tom K. and I had partaken of an early evening beverage, I caught sight of a very tiny sliver of new moon in (weak) conjunction with Venus. Being of a romantic nature I took this sighting to be some sort of congratulatory sign for my having renewed my driving license that same morning. You may wonder why congratulations would be necessary for such a seeming ordinary task, so I will enlighten you.

In these parts, driving (I refuse to use the Americanism “driver’s” in front of license) licenses come due for renewal on one’s birthday and since this event was in the offing, last week I decided to get a jump on it and do the deed. So in all innocence I trotted off to the license bureau to accomplish the task. I confidently handed my expiring license to the nice lady behind the desk and asked her to renew it. I suppose that it was the way that I spoke that caused her to ask,

“Are you an American citizen?”

To which I replied in the negative.

“I need to see your green card (resident visa) and your Social Security card.”

Confidence rapidly draining from me, I replied,

“I don’t have them with me, and the whereabouts of my SS card are completely mysterious.”

[I recall having this card issued to me in Berkeley, CA in 1966 when I was a postdoc there, but where it has been since, I have no idea. In fact I have never needed to show it, as I committed the number to memory, when I had one, and that has always been sufficient, but not with the License Bureau, apparently.]

“I suggest that you go to the Social Security office and ask for a replacement.” The aforesaid kind lady remarked. So, tail between legs, I departed her presence.

The next day I drove over to the SS office in a pouring rain storm, checked in at the front desk, got a number and waited to be called forward. To my surprise, I had hardly sat down when I was called; such promptness is most unusual in the offices of the Federal Government. It was as I was walking to the service window that apprehensiveness hit me: are these guys not on furlough as the government is shut down? The fact that I had found the front door unlocked and that I had been called up tended to calm me down. I told the gent at the window that I was there to get a new card as my original one was lost. He replied that this was not possible: in the shutdown period only a few activities were being attended to and new cards was not one of these; I was to come back when the government had opened up again. Hopes dashed, I went out into the rain and drove off to the License Bureau, to tell this tale of woe on the kind lady there and to throw myself on her mercy. I should explain for my overseas readers that the License Bureau is an arm of the State of Ohio government, not the Federal one, so they are not shut down. There is no mercy there, however; rules are rules are rules, and they must be followed to the letter.

There is an exquisite irony here, because whenever I (or any other US resident or citizen) need to confirm my identity for whatever purpose, I am asked to show a “picture ID” and the everyday way of doing this is to present my driving license. This works anywhere in the US, not only in the State where the license was issued; it is akin to a national identity card. The only people who do not recognize the license as sufficient proof of identity are the kind ladies in the License Bureau, who issue the damned thing in the first place!

Having explained my predicament to the LB lady this second time, she informed me that there were other ways of proving identity to her, such as a government document/letter that had my Social Security number inscribed thereon. Here I breathed a sigh of relief, because I knew that I could satisfy this requirement, and so yesterday I went once more, armed with my expiring license, my green card and three documents from my tax files that had my SSN on them, I presented the package to the lady together with the fee of $25, and shortly thereafter I emerged, clutching a brand new, hot-off-the-press (literally) driving license, which is valid for five years. I hope to live to repeat the process at the time of my 82^nd birthday. Of course, in that event I shall have completely forgotten this episode and will no doubt find myself repeating it

All this rigmarole was not applicable until recently, because driving licenses used to have the holder’s SSN printed on them, being taken off to prevent identity theft, I am told. The older I get, the more I realize that the “good old days” are gone forever, nobody trusts anybody anymore, and you had better get used to the new order or check yourself into the old folks home!