Window 4 — Summary

Margaret believes her 2018 license photo is the best photo anyone has ever taken of her. Something about the light, or having a good day, or the woman behind the camera who had worked at Window 4 for eleven years and had developed a rhythm that produced, on that Thursday, something Margaret recognized as her own face.

She renewed online last year. Three minutes. The new license arrived by mail with a passport photo she has always hated.

In 2018, she waited forty minutes. In those forty minutes she sat next to a young man getting his first license and an older woman who had just moved to town. The DMV was sorted by nothing. Rich and poor, old and young, every neighborhood, every occupation, in the same plastic chairs. Nobody experienced this as democracy. They thought the line was long. The democracy was the thing they could not see because they were inside it.

The DMV provided, without intending to, the one institutional experience that selected for nothing except citizenship. Everyone was there because they lived here. The accidental cross-section produced accidental encounters. These encounters were small, forgettable, the kind of conversation that evaporates by the parking lot. But they were encounters with people Margaret would not otherwise have met, producing a kind of civic knowledge: this is who lives here. These are my neighbors.

The room was the only place in town where you waited alongside a genuine cross-section of your community, and nobody noticed its absence because nobody noticed its presence.

The old license is still in the wallet, behind everything. It is not useful for anything. She keeps it because the photo is the best anyone has ever taken of her, taken by a woman with a rhythm with the camera, in a room Margaret will never sit in again.