Three weeks before my most recent birthday, the Registry of Motor Vehicles sent me a new driver’s license. This card enables me to operate an automobile legally for the next five years. It comes as reassuring to know myself entitled to drive without restriction except for needing to use “corrective lenses.”
For the first time since 1946, I did not need to wait in line at a registry office. Instead, I applied online, filling out a short questionnaire and paying the 40-dollar fee by credit card. In response to this electronic sleight-of-hand, the new license arrived in the mail a few days later. So much for the grief associated with the registry during most of my past life.
The birthday I just celebrated was my 75th so I am now covered until I reach age 80. You can expect to see me behind the wheel until at least 2008, tooling around town and on highways, provided my longevity continues in force.
For convenience, it is now a great system. This time around, they did not require me to leave my chair. And I do not have to think about it for the next half decade.
This situation would strike me as altogether ideal were it not for Russell Weller. He is the 86-year-old resident of Santa Monica who, at the time I was applying for my new license, plowed into a crowd at a farmer’s market, killing ten and injuring another 50 or so.
Weller held a valid license but had been involved in various minor automotive mishaps such as driving into the wall of his garage. About the fatal accident, he said, in a statement read by his minister: “There are no words to express the feelings my family and I have for those who suffered loss and pain as a result of Wednesday's devastating accident. I am so very distraught, and my heart is broken over the extent of the tragedy.”
According to the local police, Weller thinks he must have stepped on the gas instead of the brake. A news photo showed him using a cane when he walked out of the police station with his grandson so he apparently has a disability.
Reading about the Santa Monica tragedy has altered my consciousness. Now, when I see a newspaper story about an auto accident involving an out-of-control vehicle, the first question I wonder about is age. Was the driver a person of my years or older?
This association threatens to put me in the uncomfortable position of ageist, a person with stereotypes about old people. Just being old yourself does not protect you against this virus. To find myself classed among those who expect every older driver to be accident-prone would make me squirm.
The numbers show elders to be in fact at greater risk of accidents than most other drivers. As a group we rank above teenagers but that does not come as much consolation. Compared to other adults, we do worse although many of us have learned to compensate for driving deficiencies by modifying our habits. Thus we may no longer drive at night or on superhighways, for instance.
In reflecting on my own easy license renewal, I have to wonder if the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has fulfilled its responsibilities for ensuring public safety. Should I have been given the right to drive from 75 to 80 without any official even looking at me? I answered the questions truthfully but still the Commonwealth knows little or nothing about my physical and mental functioning. Was it prudent to have kept me on the road, sight unseen?
These questions I recognize as, in a sense, not in my own self- interest. It may seem masochistic for me to quibble at a process that efficiently rewarded me with what I wanted. Only something verging perilously close to self-hatred, you might say, would make me doubt this well-oiled new system.
To my great good fortune, in some 57 years of driving I have never had a traffic accident. Not do I hear any complaints from family members or friends about the way I drive now. I, in my regular Sunday softball game, I can handle the bat well enough to manage a few base hits and then run around the bases, then I presumably have enough well-being to steer a car with some skill.
But that may change and the Commonwealth has no system in place to track my decline in driving capability. Should there not be some way, backed by public consensus, of tracking drivers of all ages for our fitness for the road?
In the meantime my approach will be to ask family members to be vigilant about my automotive skills as I point toward 80. I want them to advise me if and when they spot any decline. Then I may at least be able to modify my driving habits to enhance everyone’s safety while still staying on the road.
Richard Griffin