9/23 The roadtest area in Middletown is only recognizable as a line of cars waiting next to the curb on a major street. Teenagers line up for their rite of passage, fathers and mothers get out, an examiner gets in. You take off and make a right immediately into a kind of kiddie coaster, a neighborhood that looks suspiciously like an actual neighborhood – it is an actual neighborhood –, if only the traffic signs weren’t a little cleaner, a little more carefully placed, and the stop lines a little more visibly drawn. 

My examiner is a cool lady in her fifties, and more than anything she tries to calm me down while being amused by how nervous I am. I tell her I can’t switch off the screen with the rear camera. – “Of course not. All cars have that now.” – My parallel parking job is perfect, so perfect in fact that I may have grazed the grass next to the road by a fraction of an inch, but I can’t tell, because I don’t get out of the car to check, and neither does she, she doesn’t even look.

After the test, which took us once around the kiddie coaster block, that Truman Show of a neighborhood, I have no idea whether I passed, and I will not know until four hours later, when the results are posted to a DMV website. Yes, my examining lady was extremely cool and relaxed, but I can easily come up with a whole bunch of things that I most likely did wrong. I should have taken a look at the roadtest checklist, the actual form which the examiner fills out, with all the possible errors and how many points they will cost you. It’s all online, but I was so focused on the parallel parking that I never checked.

As it turns out, I passed, with 15 out of 30 allowable error points. Fifteen years I took to get here, something I was supposed to have done within three months of arriving.