I held out as long as I could.
Until last week I had one of the Yukon’s craft-project driver’s licenses.
You know the type — scorned by south-of-60 bouncers, passed around and mocked as an example of territorial hickishness, easily forged on a retrograde computer and slickly laminated for protection.
These were the IDs of my youth and I enjoyed having one in the same way that I enjoy listening to Green Day’s Dookie or The Offspring’s Smash — as a reminder of an innocent time when I didn’t know what The War on Terror was and I’d never had my heart broken.
Actually, I still don’t know what The War on Terror is.
But as we age we find that some of our connections to the past are tenuous. A singular event can snip the thread of our nostalgia.
Such was the case last week when I found myself with an expired passport and a scrapbooker’s driver’s license that is no longer accepted as valid identification by major airlines — or so I’ve been repeatedly warned.
So, with a plane trip to southern British Columbia looming I sighed the sigh of a grown-up and marched down to the Lynn Building to surrender a piece of my past.
Thankfully, negotiating our local bureaucracy wasn’t as Kafkaesque as I expected and I soon found myself bemused by my new card.
Initial impressions?
It’s lighter and thinner than the old one; and when I tilt it to-and-fro, holograms that say “Yukon” (not “the Yukon”, unfortunately) emerge and disappear in the light.
I suppose it will make doormen at the Cambie less consternated, but it’s completely lacking in do-it-yourself charm.
And it has a nostalgia value of precisely zero.
But nostalgia is a funny thing, and soon my new license will carve out a groove for itself in my pocket. It will be there every time I open my wallet to buy a Rueben. It will become familiar.
And in the year 2037 (give or take) when all our pertinent identification information will be contained on scan-able brain-chips I will pine sentimentally for the days when a driver’s license was an actual thing you could hand to someone.
In the meantime I will revel in the fact that they can’t stop me from singing along to “Self Esteem” as I drive… yet.
