So far away, so close

Where's Robin? She must be very busy. Robin, please send news.
So. It's finally springlike here: Today the streets of Brooklyn were alive with sidewalk cafe diners, people pushing baby carriages, children playing, a man painting a streetscape on the corner near my home. The city suddenly seems smellier, less gloomy and gray.
A Chinese food deliveryman here disappeared a few days ago after taking an order to an off-duty policeman in a gloomy, high-rise apartment complex in the Bronx. His bicycle was still chained up outside, but he had vanished without a trace. It seemed most likely that someone had robbed and killed him; I was constructing elaborate conspiracy theories involving Triad gangs and crooked NY cops. But today he was found in a malfunctioning elevator, dehydrated but otherwise OK. In the meantime all sorts of details had emerged about his life. He was illegal and had already, in two years of delivering food, paid off his $60,000 smuggling fee. I wonder whether immigration will now send him back to China. It seems a cruel fate after everything he's been through, but I suppose they will feel that he needs to be made an example of. I wish I were an eccentric billionaire and I could read a story like that in the paper and simply pick up the phone and become the man's benefactor. It also made me think of how strange life is, that the thing you are looking for all over the place is most often right in front of you, if you have the wit to see it.
But this is supposed to be a blog about life in New York and the experience of moving, and I am drifting off course. Hmm. Today I went to the NY dmv. I was prepared for anything, so perhaps it wasn't as bad as expected. The office is located in a sort of a shopping mall where a tangle of large, pedestrian-unfriendly streets come together. The long line of people waiting seemed sent from central casting to demonstrate the ethnic diversity of Brooklyn. I have also never seen a security guard at a dmv office, though his function seemed more ceremonial than anything else. An annoyed man shouting loudly about his documents was the most tense things got there during my expensive two-hour visit. Now we must somehow get the car photographed (Insurance requires this. You would think for what we are paying for insurance that someone could go to Connecticut, where the car still is, and shoot it for us. But nooo.) and inspected. More money. And why do we have a car? A car is an easy thing to get rid of, as I learned with my Camry, and a hard thing to replace. Right now it is more financial drain and pain in the butt than anything else. If Jarek gets a job in New Jersey, he may need a car. If we can overcome our fear of the BQE we can load the dog in the car and take him to my parents' for the weekend. Or go upstate. Or go to Maine. How I would love to go to Maine....
I was talking to someone I met at work who lives in Washington Heights and owns a car. It's horrible, he said. You can't escape getting tickets, especially at first, before you figure out the alternate side of the street rules. And sometimes you get towed, and that's even worse. I asked why he bothered to own one at all. Freedom, he answered without hesitation. The feeling that you can go somewhere, even though I never have time.
In the end, isn't that what owning a car is about? Freedom. Or the illusion of freedom, which in this case is more like it.