Today is my younger son's seventeenth birthday, and he was scheduled for his driving test at 11 AM . . . but first, he needed to attend a training for his summer job as a tennis instructor at the Rutgers Prep camp (with the affable curmudgeon Ted Ransom) and we borrowed our friend's car for the driving test because you need a vehicle with an emergency brake in between the seat-- which is rare in new cars, so most people just pay the driving school to use their car, which is a total scam-- anyway, I was slated to do all this stuff with the birthday boy, but first we had an early appointment with Steve the Appliance Doctor-- and his prognosis on our stove was not good, we need a $500 valve to fix the thing-- so then Ian and I drove over to Rutgers Prep and just after we crossed the Landing Lane Bridge we witnessed a car accident, nothing epic and lucky for us it wasn't on our side-- and then I took a walk on the tow road while he trained and I learned a lot-- a friendly fisherman showed me a picture of a fifteen-pound catfish he caught in the canal the other day and he also informed me-- totally new information-- that there are pike and muskellenge in the canal-- musky!-- and I saw a lot of wildlife on my walk: turtles, a big snake, all kinds of flowers, frogs, tadpoles, and little fish . . . and an herbalist, an African American dude decked out with all kinds of harvesting gear and he told me about the powers of elderberry flowers and then I asked him if the plant on the side of the path was poison ivy and he grabbed it and took a look and confirmed that yes it was poison ivy and I was like "don't touch that shit" and he said only sixty percent of people are allergic-- which seems to be lowballing it-- and I have also read that every time you touch the stuff, you increase your likelihood of getting it, so he might have to use some of his elderberry flowers on himself . . . then we went over to the Kilmer DMV, with all our documentation, but one minute into the driving test it was over-- the instructor said that the emergency brake was too loose and that we had to get it fixed and we had two hours to do so or our appointment would be voided-- so we started driving to the mechanic but I knew that was as shot in hell, so I called Ian's driving instructor and he happened to be in the vicinity giving a lesson, so we met him in the parking lot, gave him 80 bucks and he took Ian over in his car-- what a scam, but at least it worked out-- and then Ian had a fairly wild driving test-- he had to slam on the brakes because a lady ran through a stop sign and when he tried to parallel park an old man pulled up right behind him-- but he's a great driver, so he handled it all and passed and then we got to spend some quality time in the DMV-- and though we had every fucking document on earth, it still wasn't enough for their byzantine requirements-- and we had to reprint all the numbers in the little boxes because Ian crossed out a date-- and then they asked me if I had a driver's license and I said yes and that somehow was enough stuff and he got his picture taken, got a temporary license, we went to Don Huang for noodles, and then Ian went to do some yardwork for a lady across town and he drove himself-- which was wonderful-- and then when he got back, we went to the park and played some pick-up basketball with random folks and then settled in to eat a home-cooked meal of Indian food, quite a busy birthday.
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