Plated

My parents have always hung their old license plates in our garage, kind of as documentation of the different states they'd lived in (Utah, Indiana, Illinois, Colorado, and then California forever and ever). So every time I've changed out plates, I've held onto the old ones with the expectation that someday I, too, will have a garage in which to document my moves. One of my biggest regrets has always been that I never acquired Virginia license plates. The Department of Motor Vehicles in Virginia was notorious for having 3 hour waits (no exaggeration), and as a first year teacher I really just never had that kind of time available. I decided to wait until the summer, and then in the meantime I decided to go to back to school and thought I might as well just risk driving a month on unregistered plates and register when I reached Utah. This earned me a citation (but that's another story) and a gaping hole in my license plate history.

Incidentally, that gaping hole is not, as you might expect, between Utah and Utah. I was still driving on California plates when I moved to Virginia. The double Utah plate is because I changed cars shortly before I moved to Michigan. When you buy a new car, they don't let you pull the moving-to-another-state-in-a-month stunt, and I learned my lesson the first time anyway.

When I moved to Michigan I was sad to give up my Utah plates. It wasn't because I liked Utah better than Michigan (although at that point in time I was probably still more attached to Utah), but because Utah plates were a lot more interesting than Michigan plates. I think you'll probably agree with me that AGZ up there is an unnecessarily ugly plate in this era of interesting license designs. One of the happiest days of my Michigan life was when all Michigan residents were forced, over the course of a year, to replace them with the slightly-less-boring blue and white plates.

I held onto that blue and white plate as long as I could, but Michigan registration expires on your birthday, and so this week I had to finally grant my car Utah residency. I chose the new red and gray Utah plates, mostly so that I can add some interest to my Utah-heavy garage wall someday when those plates get retired in favor of whatever may come next. And as sad as it was to remove the Michigan plate, there was something happy and satisfying about scrubbing three years worth of grime off of good ol' BEJ 0034 and hanging it, clean and shiny, on the future garage wall of my imagination. One more step away from one life and into the next, and one more reason to remember how all of these past lives have brought about the present one.

(And yes, there are two more (shortish) book reviews up: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman and Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges.)