These are my new plates!
Since I haven’t driven for such a long time (since graduate school!), and since I now have a beautiful Fiat, I wanted to honor the experience with something special.
So I began daydreaming about names.
My VW bug was named Hansel, but just in my head. No fancy plates.
This time around, a fond memory surfaced. Several years ago, I lived in an apartment on Cabrini Blvd. in New York (near the Cloisters) with a single mother and her baby boy, Joseph. We decided before I moved in that we would trade piano noise for baby noise. I got a whole lot of nothing done during my 11 months there, because I played with him so much. He was extremely cute, intelligent, and curious. I witnessed him learning to walk!
He used to scratch things and listen to the sound. The cushions, arms, and back of the couch; the end table, coffee table, lampshade and its base; and, most interesting to me, a tiny steel manufacturer’s tag on the corner of a filing cabinet! The tag had raised dots and letters, so the surface was varied.
Joseph talked all the time, using his voice to experiment with sound. When I would look him in the eye and repeat a string of sounds he had just made up, he would have an astonished look on his face, as if to say, “Oh! Someone finally gets it!”
One day, he woke up ast 5:00 a.m. saying only one word, “Addy, addy, addy,” over and over. He repeated it until he went to daycare at 8:30. When he came home at 5:30, he was still saying it. And that was the word of the day until he went to sleep around 10.
I rather liked it!
CT vanity plates can have up to seven characters, including one period. “ADDY” seemed too plain. “MY ADDY,” with 2 “Y’s,” looked too symmetrical. So I went with “MI,” since I have an Italian car.
The CT DMV website has a page where you can try out your choice to see if it’s available. So I tried it out, adding a variety of backgrounds at the same time. The plain background didn’t work for me. I like lighthouses, so there you go.
In honor of Joseph and the Italians, here it is.
Now the old plates have to be mailed back to the CT DMV. And the MA title? I’m still waiting for the MA RMV (that’s the Registry, not the Department) to cash my check and send me the duplicate. The deadline for sending it to the CT DMV was October 15th. Fortunately, they use the date as a motivator. There is no late fee.