The first week of June, I rode my trike to the clinic and asked for Dr. Keller’s longest appointment.
He’s been my doctor for twenty-two years.
“Jeff,” I said, sitting down on his paper-covered table. “I want you to examine me exactly as if you were deciding whether to take my driver’s license away. Do not be nice about it.”
He wasn’t nice about it.
He tapped my knees and my elbows with his little rubber hammer. He had me stand on one foot. Then the other. He had me get up from a chair, walk ten feet, turn around, and sit back down, while he held a stopwatch.
He had me remember three words. Draw the face of a clock with the hands at ten past eleven. Count backward from one hundred by sevens.
I did that last one faster than he could check me. A telephone operator in my day carried half the county’s phone numbers around in her head.
He put down his clipboard.
“Dorothy,” he said, “you’re in better shape than I am.”
“Put it in writing.”
He did. On the clinic’s letterhead. Signed.
No medical condition that would limit the safe operation of a motor vehicle.
The next week, I rode to the eye doctor on the courthouse square. I had my cataracts done four years ago. She put me through all of it. The chart. The side lights. The glare test.
Twenty over twenty-five in both eyes, with my glasses on. Full side vision.
She wrote that down for me too.
And because I know my son, and I know what an insurance man will say about a doctor who’s never once seen you behind the wheel, I did one more thing.
I called the driving school in the county seat. The one that teaches the high school kids. I paid eighty-five dollars for an hour with an instructor in a car with a brake pedal on his side.
He was a retired shop teacher named Gus. He took me through town. Out on the highway. Around the courthouse square twice.
And then into a parallel parking space. Something I’d been avoiding since 1971.
He never touched his brake. Not once.
He wrote on his form, with a carbon copy, that I checked my mirrors more often than any of his sixteen-year-olds. And that he’d ride with me any day of the week.
I still had my driver’s license, you understand. It had been sitting in my purse the whole time. Good for five more years.
Nobody had taken my license.
Brian had only taken the car.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.