Signs

by Donna Schoenkopf

With me, it began with being confused with the signage on public roads here in Oklahoma when I first moved back.

I have never seen anything like it, and I’ve traveled all over the United States of America. Well, maybe New Jersey can compete. But they’ll come in second.

I shall give you some examples:

On your way to Oklahoma City, traveling east on I-40, as you are passing through Midwest City, there are a series of green direction signs on overhead scaffolding, just like the ones you see in all states. They tell you which lanes are taking you which direction. But in Oklahoma these signs are over lanes that indicate the opposite of the upcoming reality.

The I-35 sign is over the two far left lanes. As you are merrily driving down the road thinking everything is just fine, you see a sign saying I-35 Next Right.

Whaaaaa?

As you confusedly look to your right, you realize you have mere FEET to get to the right lane. But RIGHT isn’t correct either. Because if you go to the far right lane it turns out to be the exit lane and you find yourself on a city street wondering, “What the hell just happened!?” Yeah. Right lane doesn’t mean right lane. It means second to the right lane.

Another example of this propensity for insane signage, again on the I-40. A sign says Highway 177 South Exit Ahead. You turn off and see a fork in the road—one fork going left and the other going straight ahead. A Highway 177 sign points left. You turn left and realize it is taking you NORTH, not south. As you look over your shoulder at the straight ahead option, you see ANOTHER sign, some distance down the straight road, way past the point of decision-making, reading 177 South with an arrow pointing straight ahead.

I cannot tell you how angry this makes me.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

But that only leads me to the fiasco of the past week—getting son John’s Oklahoma ID.

John has a genetic disability. He inherited it from me. We lose stuff. I have learned coping skills after my long life—I put things in special places and never deviate. My house is not clean (dust covers most everything and giant smears of red mud have sunk into my concrete floors and that is not to mention dirt in the runners of all eight of my sliding glass doors). BUT it is very orderly. Everything has a place (a beautiful place, I might add) and everything is IN its place. Consequently my house looks extraordinarily clean. And serene.

This lesson for not losing things was learned over many, many years of leaving things behind. Once I left my purse in a car that had picked me up when I was hitchhiking in Laurel Canyon, California, because it was the ’60s and I had no car. I had all the money of my life in that purse because I was going to an appointment to look at a house for rent.

I got out of the car and turned to walk up to the front door of the house when I realized I had left my purse in the car. I turned and watched in horror as it drove away.

There are so many examples of this in my life that I shall not burden you with any more, but let it be known that even now, with all my defensive moves for holding onto important things, I STILL occasionally leave things behind.

So. John. He is twenty-six. He finds my strategy to be anal and stressful and unnecessary. So he loses everything. We will not go into what he loses. Just know that it is a lot.

Like mother, like son.

HOW, you say, does any of this fit together? Well, I’ll tell you.

John lost his wallet. With all his identifying papers. And so, we had decided that we would get him an Oklahoma ID.

Uh huh.

We began with a problem. Where to go. In Oklahoma the place to go for an ID is a place NOT called the DMV. Nope. I had looked everywhere in the phone book for the DMV, the Department of Motor Vehicles, etc., and nothing. Nowhere. Under any listing, governmental or non.

(Right here, I am letting out a long sigh of frustration, just writing about this.)

So what DO you do????

You ask someone, of course. (Which is what I did two years ago when I was trying to get my Oklahoma driver’s license.)

Whoever you ask will look at you as though you are an alien (which you are!) and tell you that the TAG AGENCY is over on Highland.

And sure enough, there it is. It says Tag Agency on a sign out front.

But DO NOT GO THERE FOR YOUR DRIVER’S LICENSE. I sat there for a long, long time, finally got to the official lady, and was told I had to go to the DMV. The non-existent DMV.

There IS a DMV, unlisted of course, with a tiny sign, hidden away across town in the local military armory. I eventually found it and finally got my license because in Oklahoma you need to go to TWO places in order to get your license.

I didn’t remember this. (I’m getting old.) So John and I went to the Tecumseh Tag Agency to get his Oklahoma ID.

The Tecumseh Tag Agency is in a sweet little building on the main street, which is not Main Street, but Broadway Street. Main Street is in the residential area.

Of course.

We entered. John had his birth certificate and a pay stub for verification of his identity. And he had me, his mom.

We sat down on two of the four chairs in a tiny room, with a middle-aged woman sitting on another. There were two empty desks on the other side of the room. There was no number thingy to get a number to keep everyone orderly.

We peeked through a door into a side room where an official-looking woman was giving an application to an old geezer.

We asked the sitting woman what to do. She looked at us like we were crazy and said, “Well, just sit down.”

So we did.

Eventually, after the old geezer left and the middle-aged woman was taken into the other room, the official lady came out, smiling, and John told her he was there to get an Oklahoma ID. No, he said, he had never had one from Oklahoma before. John showed her his birth certificate and pay stub. She said we would have to go to the Shawnee DMV to get entered into the computer. She said that she thought his papers would be fine, but if it wasn’t they would accept his mother’s (my) verification that he was my son. She said the DMV had moved and was now next to the YMCA.

Well, we KNEW where the YMCA was. John went there a lot.

We climbed into the car and drove to Shawnee and up to the YMCA. There was no DMV building, no sign, anywhere.

We drove back to the old DMV site in the armory and saw a small hand-painted sign under the armory sign out front, stating it had moved. It gave the address, not far away, on Airport Road.

We put the car into reverse and drove over to Airport Road, looking for the address. There were no numbers on any of the buildings. We guesstimated where it might be. But the building we thought it might be in was abandoned, dirt on the windows, dark. It had a small Department of Safety sign on a chain-link fence.

We drove on. We saw an official-looking building. At least there were vehicles in the parking lot. Ahhhhh, this must be it.

There were some Public Works pickups there and a guy walking into a metal building. We asked him where the DMV was. A confused look came over his face. He didn’t know.

We put the car into reverse and on our way out of the parking lot saw another guy who immediately knew that we were looking for the DMV and told us it was back down the road from whence we had come.

We re-drove down Airport Road slowly, looking carefully at all the buildings. Nope, not the Shawnee Little Theater. Not the Early Childhood Center. Where the hell WAS it? We turned around again, retraced our route, and came upon the abandoned building again. This time we looked CAREFULLY at the small green sign on the chain link fence. It did say Department of Safety and underneath that in small letters were the words Drivers Licenses.

In an abandoned building?

We turned into the parking lot and saw that yes, indeed, the front part of the building was unoccupied but the back part did have the DMV, but, of course, those identifying words were never written anywhere.

By this time, already having a grudge against bad signage and directions, I was pretty “het up.”

We entered the building and found the Drivers Licenses room.

son John

Once inside the almost empty room we faced the strangest arrangement of furniture I have ever seen in a public building. There were rows of folding chairs all facing forward to a blank wall. Behind those chairs, in curtained off roomettes, were desks for test-taking and officialdom.

I guessed we were facing a blank wall so we couldn’t help someone cheat on their test. My answer to that is, PULL THE CURTAIN.

Have you ever faced a blank wall in an almost empty room full of chairs? It’s very weird.

ANYWAY, John took a number (they had numbers!), and seeing as how there was only one other person in the huge room, he was called after only ten minutes.

He went to the woman official and told her why he was there. He showed her his birth certificate and pay stub. She said the pay stub was not good enough and did he have anything else and when he said no, she said, “Boy, you’re a real mess, aren’t you.”

It made my blood boil. I am the only one allowed to say that to John. So I said loudly, in the empty room, facing the blank wall, “How rude!”

John told the official woman that his mother was with him and could vouch for him like the lady at the Tecumseh Tag Agency had said. She asked how old he was. He replied that he was twenty-six. She told him he was too old for mother verification and would need to go the Pottawatomie Court House to register to vote.

So he collected me from the empty room and we went to the parking lot where we met a couple who looked lost. They asked us if this was the DMV.

We both laughed and said yes.

We climbed back into the car and went to the Pottawatomie Courthouse, where I had worked almost fifty years earlier as a Deputy County Clerk. Got checked for firearms at the door, went down the marble stairs to the Voter Registration room. John filled out an application for a voter card. No identifying paperwork needed (although Oklahoma IS pushing for ID for voter registration, hating “illegal aliens” as most, but not all, of our citizens do).

But, sorry, the young woman told him, she had just formatted the whatever thingy and she couldn’t get him his card until Friday.

We left the courthouse, drove home over hill and dale, back down Killer Highway 177, without John’s Oklahoma ID.

So that’s where it stands.

I, personally, have had enough.

And you?

Well, good. Because that’s the end of the story. I will let you know if John ever gets his Oklahoma ID.

I hope he doesn’t lose it.

P. S. Just got a phone call from John.  He is stuck in Tulsa with no gas money because his cousin, Alex, lost his wallet.  I TOLD you it was genetic.

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