Constant Craving

I promised you this story a while ago, Gentle Reader, the story of Beauty's license plate.

I ordered it from the DMV in San Mateo, because that was Beauty's home for years, and that's where her car doctor is. After I picked it up today, I dropped in for a visit, because I hadn't seen him since last summer's drama ended, the day I brought Beauty home.

I figured he missed me.

(He did.)

We went outside, where Beauty was waiting in the beautiful California sunshine, and smiled at her, and he said, "Wow, that's really a beautiful car. She doesn't look anything like the car I picked up for you at the auction house."

I blushed on behalf of Beauty, who can't. Then I told him how I'd visited Jack's father over the Christmas holidays, and how we'd agreed to blame the Awful Events on the incompetence of the administrators of Jack's estate, so that we could go on. I didn't tell him that, even though there was a great deal of incompetence on that front, I know in my heart that it was Jason, Jack's brother, who kept me from Beauty. But it's all in the past now, there was a happy ending, Beauty is with me, and I'm going to keep my promise to Jack, to look after her. Forever.

Besides, Jack's father let me play the storied Fender Stratocaster. And he let me put on Jack's old leather flight jacket.

When Jack bought Beauty, back in the homeland in 1996, her license plate was 105 YZT. That's how plates were doled out back then: three numbers, followed by three letters. It's different now. That was a long time ago.

When he moved to California in 1998 Jack flew, and Beauty took the train. Jack told me he planned to get the same license plate for her in California as she had at home. Just because he could.

Except he couldn't.

There was some sort of rule about choosing a vanity plate that was too similar to a regular, randomly assigned plate. It's a stupid rule, but such is the nature of bureaucracy. So he got 1O5YZTA instead.


The astute Gentle Reader who is also a Star Trek fan might take a moment to examine the plates in the two pictures above, and smile. For everyone else, I shall explain:

The registration number of the first starship Enterprise, the one we know from the original Star Trek series, was NCC-1701. That Enterprise is destroyed in the movie, The Search For Spock, and in subsequent movies the new Enterprise is NCC-1701A. Captain Picard's Enterprise is NCC-1701C.

When Beauty finally came to me, her plates had been removed. My first impulse, because I knew the meaning of the plates Jack assigned to her, was to get hers back. But then I got a better idea.

I got 1O5YZTB.


Do you remember the episode of Lost when Desmond gets stuck in a time warp, and Daniel Faraday tells him he needs to find a constant, something that was important to him in the past, and the present, and Desmond chooses Penelope?

Well, Beauty was Jack's constant. And now she's mine.