Welcome to Texas

During my early and mid twenties I spent a lot of time setting goals. I had a the one year, two year, five year, and ten year plan. Goals could be as vague as “international travel” or “keep performing” or as specific as “save $5k by June, 2001” or “learn to speak conversational Italian.” I can promise you that “become a nurse and move to Texas” never made the list. And yet here I am, a nurse who has now lived in Texas for 18 days.

I loved living in New York, and still can’t believe that I left. Moments arise, however, to cleanse me of any such confusion. Just the other day I went to the DMV to get a Texas driver’s license. Though I’m sure I knew it at some point, it came as a surprise to me as I filled out the paperwork that I would be expected to turn in my New York license. Not only that, but the wording was something like “state from which current license will be surrendered.” Surrendered? Does the acting of giving back one’s driver’s license really deserve such dramatic wording? It’s not like I was giving up a weapon, or a battle, or a painting I stole from the Louvre. It was merely a driver’s license from the state of New York. I stood there in the sardine-like quarters of the Texas Department of Safety (are all DMVs the same? Why is there never enough space? Do the people who design these places never go to them and thus never understand how poorly they are able to handle the sheer volume of humanity who pass through their doors on any given day?) and found myself crying as I filled in line after line on my form. I became suddenly aware that I felt like I had given up on New York, or worse, that New York had given up on me, and now I was being punished by having to surrender my driver’s license; my only official document and claim to having lived there, driven there, thrived there.

A woman with voluminous 80’s rock band hair in a thick pink sweater stood at the microphone and kindly called me out of my sorrow.

“Number 58, Number 59, Number 60, 61, and 62,” she shouted, seeming to forget she was using a microphone. I glanced up, she caught my eye, and I affirmed that I was indeed Number 59.

“Okay honey, “ she nodded, half-smiling with her hand over the mike, “you go on ahead to line number 1.”

Something about her made me feel better. Maybe it was her hair, or her coarse, direct communication style, or the fact that really, she could have been from Weehawken. She was familiar, and she was nice to me, and I knew if I told her how sad I was about surrendering my license, she would have understood and given me a nice pat on the back with her big hands and pink sunburst acrylic nails.

Soon I was giving my finger prints, taking a vision test, and listening to the lady next to me going on and on about how disappointing it was for her to have to take a new photo for her new license, since her last license was the "best ID photo of her life.” She spoke with a warm, honeyed South Texas accent and somehow got the agent to let her pose three times for three different shots.

“Oh honey, now, would you just be a sugar and let me take just another one? I think that last one just looked so glossy, you know?”

She lined up again against the blue wall. The agent snapped the photo. My agent and I exchanged knowing smiles.

“Oh sugar pie, I think we need to do just one more now, don’t you? Just to be sure it’s the very best? I mean, I wore this nice black v-neck with the lace around the neck and I just don’t think that lace is showing up on these shots like it should. I mean I really want this to look good, honey.”

When I realized she was on photo op number three, I let discretion go by the wayside and turned around to watch. There I found another big-haired blond beauty, hovering somewhere around age 50, with vast amounts of black mascara, blue eye shadow, and rouge. I say rouge rather than blush because I really think that’s what she used, or certainly imagine that is how she would refer to it. She was dressed in black jeans with a silver-studded Western belt, black boots, and yes, that black v-neck shirt edged in lace, a lovely frame for the 4-plus inches of cleavage she was sporting.

For her final shot, she smiled and unabashedly pushed her arms up and into the sides of her chest, thrusting the lace-bound Cleveland into the camera’s viewfinder. Her agent’s eyebrows were raised as high as mine as we watched this final bold gesture. The picture taken, our subject relaxed her stance, winked at me, and shimmied up to the desk to analyze her final pose.

“Ah, Sweet Jesus, sugar, that’s the one! We did it! Oh my, it looks so GOOOOOD!”

My eyebrows still in the “in shock” position, I turned back to my agent who shook her bowed head and exhaled audibly, her hands braced on the counter. After a beat, she brought her head up, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Welcome to Texas, Sugar.”