Normalcy

 

Spending an hour and fifteen minutes at the MVA  on Dobbin yesterday afternoon was not the return to normalcy that I have been craving. Nonetheless, I am happy to say that all my documents were accepted and my license is now officially renewed. It has been weird driving around with an expired license for over a year. 

In case you are curious, a few details:

• Most people were wearing masks.
• The seating doesn’t foster physical distancing.
• The employees are behind plexiglass 
• On a warm day there was no AC and the front door was propped open. (Or was that for increased air circulation?)

Trips to the MVA are never thrilling but being fully vaccinated made a visit which had been impossible now possible. I knew I needed to have some gratitude for that. I spent the time waiting for my number to be called contemplating all the hardships my fellow humans have undergone during the last year: healthcare workers, families nursing seriously ill relatives, essential workers of all sorts, those suffering with COVID at home or in a hospital. Surely I could sit in a stuffy room while wearing a mask for 75 minutes.

I also managed to fit in my own little pity party nonetheless. I’m not the best at waiting rooms. Who is? In the end I was thrilled to walk away knowing my mission was accomplished. 

My voyages into the outside world over the last year have been limited almost completely to doctors’ offices: chairs carefully spaced, masks required, covid questionnaires and temperature checks a part of the routine. Take a clean pen. Use it and then place it with the dirty pens. At the desk employees are behind plexiglass; your doctor wears a mask and a shield. 

The MVA is different. I guess their layout doesn’t allow for all those protections. So now we are all playing catch-up together to get up to date on car-related issues.

I’d like to say that I popped on over to the Starbucks for a Frappuccino or wandered through the Owen Brown Dollar Tree to celebrate. Instead I went home and collapsed into my comfy chair and regaled my family with my not-so-interesting adventures. You would think I had put in a full day of work. Overtime, even.

This returning to the real world is a bigger challenge than I had expected.