My wife Pat and I recently learned how important holding onto a driver’s license and keeping it current can be. Neither of us had thought about it much really.
But we definitely learned something that hopefully we’ll never forget.
One afternoon I went over to pick up my 96-year-old mother-in-law so I could take her for her weekly hairdresser appointment.
As it turned out, she said she wasn’t going that day because she wasn’t feeling too spiffy.
She also quickly informed me she couldn’t find her cell phone. She told me where she last saw it but it was not there of course.
This was about 1:30 in the afternoon. I searched throughout her house, meticulously looking in each room, including her garage, outside in her back yard, looking around in the front yard. I even searched the trash can outside because she told me she’d put some trash out that morning.
As I had begun looking, I contacted Pat so she’d be aware of what was going on. I searched until shortly before 3 p.m. when I had to leave and take care of something with my work.
I arrived back at her house around 4:30 or so and renewed the search, just knowing surely I’d find it.
My wife called just before she left her office for the day and said she was on the way. We all continued looking and Pat decided we’d searched long enough and announced we were taking her to get a new phone.
Once we got to the phone place is where it got interesting. I never knew how hard it might could be to get a new cell phone.
My mother-in-law couldn’t remember the passcode to her phone. Just as important, though, was when they asked her for her driver’s license as another form of ID.
She had one, all right, and produced it for the salesman. Problem was it had expired. She stopped driving around 3 years ago and of course didn’t worry about renewing it.
From there, it went downhill. The salesman couldn’t even close out her account since she couldn’t remember her passcode, and my wife tried every number she thought it my might be.
The only option, they were told, is to buy a new phone and line and place it on my wife’s account.
So, we left the store without much of a solution, we went to get a bite to eat, back to my motheri-n-law’s house and searched some more.
About 9 p.m. we gave it up for the evening and Pat and I headed home. Thirty minutes later Pat received a call from her mom who had put the cell phone in a drawer where she keeps embroidery items.
No one knows, not even my mother-in-law, why she placed it there.
But the lesson learned here is always keep your driving license current, even if you give up driving.