Vehicular Beauty

Sitting in the pews at the Atlantic Center Department of Motor Vehicles I got a quick sermon as a quote from Confucius ran across the flat screen TV hanging above the cues. "Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it." It was an amusing thing to read sitting there a block away from the devastation of the Atlantic Yards construction site, a stone's throw away from the arboreal carnage this week's tornadoes wrought, in a place often associated with bureaucratic sadism.

The beauty at the DMV was not hard to see, though. Not only was I in and out in under an hour, but the two women who took my case guided me with uncanny acumen and restraint. I felt they were the kind of people that could easily take on my personal brand of folly and straighten me out permanently. Perhaps excellent people to have as backseat drivers, maybe, like my daughter was once in my dream. I don't know if you've ever had any of those automobile dreams where for some reason you can't quite control your vehicle? I used to have them from time to time and they made me feel horrible. As time went by they started to resolve better; in one of the most recent ones the insane vehicle I was driving led to a courtyard in which grew a small tree of life laden with fruit reminiscent of tiny spiraling galaxies.

In another my daughter sat in the back as I tried to drive a straight line down the center of a residential street but for some reason kept loosing control and driving up on the curb. My dream daughter spoke to me: "Mom, just SLOW DOWN." She is not named Sophie for nothing.