A Day in the Life

I called on the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) today to renew a driver’s license. Based on both past experiences and the bureaucracy’s somewhat notorious reputation, I understandably was not looking forward to the adventure. Where I call home afforded me a variety of choices as to where to complete this task. I could have ventured up to the DMV in Yonkers, just past the New York City line, and closer to my hometown Bronx’s alternative on Fordham Road, which I could have also accessed via a twenty-minute bus ride—give or take a few minutes.

I journeyed instead into Manhattan, calling upon the License Express on 30th Street near Fifth Avenue. So, even if it took me a little more time—via a subway ride and a several block walk—it was a wise move on my part. Who ever heard of getting one’s business sorted out in a DMV office in under a half hour? The times are a-changin’ and this is an instance of changin’ for the better.

In my travels this morning en route to the DMV, I encountered an elderly man—a face, really, that somehow got into mine for a split second. Our eyes met. “I know that guy,” I said to myself. “Sure, that’s Joe Franklin…I think…a New York City radio institution.” To verify my sighting, I Googled him as soon as I got home and, happily, discovered he’s still among the living at the ripe old age of eighty-eight.

On my subway ride home—with just about everyone in the car preoccupied with his or her iPhone—a religious zealot touted the importance of reading the Bible and preparing for eternal life in either Heaven or Hell. He phonetically spelled out the word Bible, too—B-I-B-L-E—so that there would be no misunderstanding. He, though, wasn’t asking for any money and just wanted to save subway straphangers’ souls. A little while later, somebody who was asking for spare change materialized. He said he’d just gotten out of Riker’s Island, a well-known jail complex in these parts, and was valiantly trying to get his new life in order, starting with getting his clothes cleaned. I would have given him something, but it was too difficult for me to access the change in my pocket while seated uncomfortably and scrunched beside a heavyset fellow with both an umbrella and halitosis. This troubled young man came up empty, which made me feel kind of bad because maybe he was telling the truth. My unsolicited advice to him in future subway appearances is to work with some sort of money receptacle, because handing over cash and coins to the actual hands of those with a hand out, as it were, is an extra and unnecessary hurdle to maximizing the bottom line.