A Memoir by Kurt Schmidt
While the snowstorm was raging outside, I was reading a letter that said I was a criminal, delinquent in paying a fine. Being accused of a crime I didn’t commit? The words in this prophecy indicated I’d soon lose my driver’s license, or worse.
The letter said I was remiss in failing to pay a recent parking ticket in a city that I had not visited in over two years. In mid-January, I had supposedly parked overnight in a “snow emergency” zone. The license plate number in the letter was mine, but no one else had ever used my car to travel overnight to a city seventy miles away to do who-knows-what in the middle of the night. I owed $75.
If I failed to pay in 30 days, I would incur a late fee. If I failed to pay in 60 days, another late fee. “After 90 days of the issue date, outstanding tickets will be sent to a Collection Agency and can not be contested in court.” I figured with the bold letters, the underline, and capitalization of “collection agency” that these folks really meant business. Moreover, I would be unable to register my car again until the fine was paid.
My mental state was already tenuous from the storm and two painful hospitalizations in the last four months. I’d had a blocked coronary artery and then a bowel obstruction. I was still in recovery and trying to avoid any potential situations that might cause emotional distress. It was a Saturday, so I had the rest of the weekend to obsess about it and shovel snow.
The snowstorm had ended by the time I called the Bureau on Monday and asked the woman who answered if she could talk to me about a problem with a parking ticket. I gave her the ID number from the letter. After a short pause, she responded, “Yes, seventy-five dollars. What’s the problem?” I explained that I hadn’t traveled to Manchester in over two years and that no one else had used my car. She said she would have to look into it and call me back. Probably tomorrow, she said, because the Bureau was experiencing a storm-related problem today. Although she took down my phone number, I worried that her voice sounded grumpy and not in the mood to deal with someone who claimed his parking ticket was empty of any truth.
On Tuesday I waited for a phone call that never came. As an inveterate worrier, I stewed about it all day and googled the Bureau to see if there was some person’s name associated with it. There was a Bureau Coordinator named Donna. I called again Wednesday morning and heard a cheery female voice that I hoped was Donna. When I explained that I’d talked with someone on Monday about a parking ticket that could not be mine, the voice asked if I knew who I’d spoken too. I said I didn’t know but that maybe it was Donna. The cheery voice asked me to hold. Moments later a different cheery voice said, “This is Donna. How can I help you?” I explained the circumstances again and said, “How could this happen?” Apparently the ticket had been written in the dark of night and in isolation. Maybe the officer had copied the wrong plate number. She would do “some research” and call me back. If the rest of the day went by without her call, I would probably walk down to our nearby frozen lake and stick my head in an ice fisherman’s hole.
But she did call. The officer who’d written the ticket had neglected to note that the license plate of the violator was a cardboard temporary plate. Sometimes the Department of Motor Vehicles gives out temporary plates with low numbers without any concern as to whether that number still belongs to a permanent plate like mine. So that meant a road-rage psychopath could be out there, committing crimes in my name. I said this episode had been distressing and asked if there was anything in my letter from them that I still needed to worry about. She said to just destroy the letter and not worry.
I did not destroy the letter. I still worried. Perhaps if the authorities came for me, I could hide in the attic. I considered writing a letter to the state attorney general just so there would be some record of the incident and my phone conversation with Donna. But she’d been apologetic, and I didn’t want to cause trouble for her.
But what if my unpaid parking ticket was still in the bureaucracy computer system when I went to our town clerk to register my car? I’d still have criminal status.
A week later I drove to the town hall and entered the town clerk’s office. She smiled. After offering my old registration, I watched her facial expression as punched my numbers into her computer. She squinted a bit. Did she see that I was a criminal, or was it just eye strain? Then she smiled again and instructed me to write a check to the town and one to the state. After doing so, I told her my mistaken-identity story. She laughed and shook her head. I laughed too.
But on the drive home I wondered about the police arriving at my door one day to say a security camera had captured my license plate on a car racing away from a bank robbery. I was supposed to be feeling better, but my imagination was working overtime. I needed my brain to take a break and shut up about potential storms that might never arrive.
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Kurt Schmidt is the author of the novel, Annapolis Misfit, (Crown Publishers) and chapbook memoir, Birth of a Risk-Taker, (Bottlecap Press). As cancer survivor with PTSD, he overcame anxiety to fly in a small plane piloted by his newly-licensed son, who previously crashed a dirt bike and Mazda Miata at various race tracks and now races a Porsche and flies his own plane (crashing neither hopefully). Their flight story appeared in The Boston Globe and the Rock Salt Journal and can be viewed among others at www.kurtgschmidt.com.