A License to Scream
By FRANK BRUNI
ONLY three times in my life have I been so scared that I trembled — legs quivering, hands jittering, heart out of control. The first was at 12, when I watched “The Exorcist” before I should have. The second was at 41, when, on the kind of dare to which middle-aged men seem peculiarly vulnerable, I got into a canvas harness and prepared to jump some 250 feet into a gorge in Zambia.
The third was a few months ago, on Staten Island, when I was asked by an examiner for the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles to pull out of a parking spot and drive toward a nearby stoplight.
A humdrum task, you say? Undeserving of horror? You’ve never met the examiner. And you don’t yet understand what a crazy-making path I’d traveled to that fraught and climactic point — to the possibility that, at 45, I just might be able to drive legally again.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Driven Mad on the Path to a New York License - NYTimes.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment