New Passport

AKA Five years later...

I thought I‘d be sorry to have to let my old passport go. I’ve had it for five years. It’s been, literally, a lot of places with me; Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, the EU, Faaa, Gibraltar, Hawaii, Isla de Pascua, Jamaica, Kobenhaven… and then things fall apart, I can’t find a single visa in it for a place that starts with L, though I know I flew into Lisbon once, and the only M is Morocco which is written in Arabic and so is indecipherable. Lots of P’s though: Portugal, Pitcairn, Polynesia, Panama, Porto Praia, and Pagado. The visa to Chile isn’t a stamp but rather a scruffy scrap of paper stapled onto the back page that says “valido hasta la expiracion del pasaporte”. Sven and Lisa and I read that over many times because all three of us had thought that Canadians were only allowed to have a three month visa to Chile and every website we could find seemed to back us up. Sven was concerned that we wouldn’t leave Chilean waters until over three months from the date I had first entered the country but it really seemed that the visa said it was good until my passport expired. My coolest visa of all, however, hands down, is the Brazilian one, partly because I got it in the Cape Verde Isles, off the west coast of Africa, but mostly because is it a full page, complete with a colour photo of me, on a bit of paper that looks for all the world like currency. It’s taped in. The day I got that visa I had the worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had in my life and thought maybe I’d die in a hospital on the island if I could even make it that far. I can still remember how worried HS sounded after I passed out in the head that night, underwear down around my ankles, and fell with a loud crash into the galley sending pots and pans flying in all directions. It says, “05  DEZ 2012 / visto valido por 05 anos a partir de data da concessao / maximo 180 dias por ano”, and, re-reading this now, I wonder if this means that I can peel it out of my old passport and tape it into my new one.

I didn’t want to let my old passport, with its visas that were keys to so many memories, go.

I didn’t want a new impersonal empty passport.

Until I got it, that is.

My new passport is crisp and clean. The covers are sturdy enough that they feel almost wooden and the Canadian coat of arms, embossed on the faux-leather front in gold ink, glitters enticingly. Each of the visa pages has an image watermarked on it, a mini-chronological history of Canada, starting with symbols of the aboriginal peoples on the first page and Samuel de Champlain’s boat on the second. Inside the front cover is a message from ‘Her Majesty the Queen’ to ‘whom it may concern’ asking them to ‘allow the bearer to pass freely, without delay or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.’ And, a few centuries later, inside the back cover, it states that the passport contains an integrated circuit and asks one to ‘please treat this document as you would any other portable electronic device’. It also gives the e-mail address to contact in case of emergency: sos@international.gc.ca (and I am pleased to see that, sensibly, the spelling of this address is the same in both English and French). At the very first touch, I like it. Already I can’t imagine why I didn’t think I would. It represents possibilities. As surely as a lottery ticket. Where will I go with this passport? Who will I meet? What adventures lie ahead? “Check your personal information first and then sign it,” the passport official tells me and hands me a pen. I go ahead and sign without reading it over because I am too entranced to do so right at that moment but then later sit in my car before I leave the parking lot making sure that it's OK. Yes. It is. In fact, it’s perfect.

Look out world, here I come!

PS I’ve been separated for 5 years now and, looking at my passport, I don’t think it takes a degree in psychology to see how well I’ve been (not) dealing with that. The list of places I have been to in the past five years represents an incredibly literal escape, one might say, from my failure to succeed at the life I had intended. Plan A would have been to stay married, work at MCS, and live in Deep. That didn’t happen. Plan B, however, if nothing else, has been interesting.


PPS Looking over my old passport I think it would be lovely to get the second half of the alphabet in my new one (though X looks challenging - I will have to hit up China for that I think) and so am tickled pink when, just a few weeks later, my first stop over is in Zurich of all places. I`m not required to go though passport control, and I feel it is cheating a bit to get a stamp for somewhere I`m not actually staying, but, nonetheless I can`t resist...

The List

AKA The 'Perkins's Tent' List

I am, very slowly, getting ready to go off on vacation again. I have made myself a list of things I have to do before I go. Currently it has 34 items on it. Some of them are simple; find someone to take over the lease of my house, box up all my stuff, find available storage, rent a truck, get help moving my boxes, cancel all my utilities….  Others are a wee bit more complicated.

I try very hard to cross 2 or 3 things off my list every day but it is nonetheless growing longer and longer. I insist it fits on one page (because more than one page would be overwhelming) but the newer items are written in tiny print squished into the margins and the whole thing shares qualities with Perkins's Tent (the one Mr Granger borrowed for the Quidditch World Cup).

Even the jobs I do do (choose and order new prescription glasses) lead only to more items to be put on the list (pick up prescriptions glasses, learn how to use my benefit plan to get money back - a more time consuming process than one might hope I discover as it requires entering information online and then waiting for a password to be mailed back to me by snail mail (really?) before being allowed to access the system – and, since my chosen glasses cost more than my benefits allow, I also have to find and fill out appropriate paperwork so my ex can apply for the excess cost from his plan, and, of course, encourage him to do so…). Some jobs, obviously, like getting new glasses, I could have done months ago but didn’t.

Getting a new passport is another job I could have done months ago but didn’t. The passport office opens each weekday at 7:30 am. On Friday, the last day of school, I download, print out, and fill in an application form. Over the weekend I go to Walmart to get photos taken (two Walmart’s to be precise, in very different geographic directions from Arnprior, as the first one, who would have guessed, didn’t do passport photos.) Monday morning, the first day of summer holidays, at 7:15 am, I am in Ottawa lined up outside the passport office with my photos and double-checked paperwork clutched in my hand, though, I quickly realize, the first day of summer holidays might not be the most well thought out day of the year to choose to stand in this particular line.

I go to Deep River to check on the boxes I have in storage there and see a motor boat that would be perfect for one of my kids. Out comes my list: check out boat, learn whether our marina slip is big enough, find out how much boat insurance is... and, oh yes, thinking of insurance, I have to make sure my car insurance is pre-paid before I go, and I have to find out about and buy travel insurance, and make sure that someone knows where my will is, and write a letter to my Mum…

I stop in for coffee with Rick and Terry. "Put that on your list, they joke, 'Coffee with Rick and Terry.'" and I do. And it reminds me of all the other things that are not on my list, the most important things of all actually; share a glass of wine with Shelley, have a swim with Suzanne at her cottage, go to Steve's retirement dinner, call Sheila... 

Some items on my list are genuine chores. Others are a total joy. Like shopping for new sailing clothes. I remember in the fall buying a new outfit or two for school and wanting, desperately, at that time, to be buying sailing clothes instead. It seems only a few heart beats ago, but, somehow, now, already, I get to buy sailing clothes. I pick them up super-cheap second-hand at Value Village and think of them as disposable. I don’t want anything that I am too attached to so that if they get covered in red paint (see Northern Magic) or left on a tiny island (see Hao) I don’t mind too much. Also, I want to travel as light as possible so that if I jump ship (see Sydkorset) or disaster strikes (see Picton Castle) I can walk away carrying all my belongings easily on my back. But, since I am going to be wearing the same clothes day after day after day, I also want things I like. So - a few choice items. I cruise the aisles, for when I am cruising the isles, feeling like a kid in a candy store picking out one warm polar fleece, two quick dry t-shirts, one lightweight dress and I have trouble not doing a happy dance as I make my way to the checkout line.  (Yes. Yes! YES! I’m going to get to go sailing again! YES!!)

As I’m waiting to pay I remember that I have to check that my debit card isn’t going to expire, and alert my credit card company to the fact that I’m going to be abroad, and download that facebook app my kids were telling me about onto my new phone - the new phone that I haven’t chosen or bought yet… and I pull out my list and scribble these new thoughts down.

Unfortunately, despite my definite shopping success, I can’t even cross ‘buy sailing clothes’ off of my list yet because I still need a new bra, so, as usual, it’s longer than before.

But I’m going to get to go sailing! Yeah! Hip Hip Hooray!

Assuming, of course, that I can get through this list.

I should be able to. It's down to 48 items now.

On Hold

July - Once again, On Hold

I have spent most of this month being what I think of as ‘on hold’. (A state that I have spent too much of my life in BTW.) When I am on hold I am not really doing anything, I am just waiting, passing time, fitting my life awkwardly around others’ activities.

I was on hold for whole days sometimes when the kids were little and one had a birthday party or some such to go to in the middle of the afternoon and so the rest of us just frittered away the day without purpose.

I was on hold for a whole week occasionally after Ardre got sick when the kids would be staying with him and I was home alone in endless echoing solitude, but couldn’t go away, or even make plans I wouldn’t be able to break, because I knew that if he got too tired he’d bring them all back at a moment’s notice, so I was left at loose ends, frustrated, filling each day without knowing if it was my last alone or not.

I was on hold for a whole year more than once when I was unemployed but the kids were older, enrolled in school and sports, and it made sense on several different levels to stay around, but I couldn’t find enough to do to with all my hours and so ended up feeling unfulfilled and hence irritated, waiting, always waiting, for their school day to end, for example, so I could ferry them to hockey, but then just waiting again, for that to be over.

I lost a whole decade on hold married to Geoff.

If I were an industrious person, enterprising and entrepreneurial, or even merely social, all this time could easily have been used productively rather than having been wasted. I could have learnt to play the violin, or written academic papers, or started up a home-based business, or even just spent it all congenially with friends and family. But I am not. And so the hours, weeks, and years dragged by slowly and painfully empty.

I remember being very happy with endless time off when the kids were very little and I was on extended maternity leave and my days were filled with looking after babies and toddlers, which I actively enjoyed, and I went to FEN, the community mother and child drop-in center most days, so much so that I ended up making friends, and I belonged to a couple of different groups that met weekly, and I was on good terms with my mother and visited her regularly, and I even had a best friend, also home with small kids, who called me on a daily basis and arranged activities for us all to do together. But as my kids got older and my relationship with my mother disintegrated and my best friend moved out west and most other mothers returned to work (as opposed to me, who chose to return to depression instead) my days got longer and less focussed and everything started to fall apart.

School here finishes at the end of June. I’d been planning to let my lease run out then, pack up all my stuff, put it in storage, and leave, go off on the 1^st of July. But my youngest son got a summer job working landscaping just a few miles from here (near Arnprior, what are the chances of that?) and asked if he could stay with me. He’s going into his last year of college next fall, this is the last summer in which any of my children will not be graduated and be, hopefully, working, living their adult lives, the last legitimate time any of my children might want to live with me.

So, of course, I said, ‘Yes.’

But now, for the summer, my vacation is on hold, my life is on hold, I am on hold. I didn’t have to stay here but the coincidence of him wanting to live here along with the sentimentality of it being my last son’s last summer as a kid were just too strong to resist. But I don’t have a plan, a single friend in the area, or enough to do. So days hang long. I cycle a bit, read a bit, work slowly through my pre-departure list, but I also spend a lot of time doing nothing. I could have gone away, for at least part of the summer, but not wanting to miss even an evening of time with my kids holds me here. He works long days, 12 hours of labour in the hot sun, and so when he gets home we swim in the gathering dusk, then eat, then sit and chat for an hour and then it is already time for bed.

I fully intend to get up each morning to see him off but usually he is long gone by the time I pull myself out of bed so I crawl back in and go back to sleep for another couple hours or lie snuggled in the warm cocoon of my covers with a book or even turn on my laptop and watch TV shows one after another. Often it is noon before I get myself bowl of cereal, which I take back to eat in bed, and 3 pm before I finally emerge, shower, and go for my morning coffee and internet check-in at Tim’s.  It is with shame that I admit this. Though I am not unhappy with this dispersion of time, the lassitude of it all seems, if not sinful, then at least unhealthy. I feel compelled to come up with a thumbnail story of what I have done each day lest he ask, and when he is off, gone for a weekend, the release from the need to justify, to anyone, my total inactivity, is actually that, a release.

I am considering abstaining from facebook. I know people tend to post when there are positives in their lives, and not when there aren’t, but the daily barrage of amazing things that my facebook friends are doing contrasts so greatly with the barrenness of my own existence that it worries me. I feel as if, if my son weren’t here, I could die and my desiccated remains wouldn’t be found until my landlady ran out of post-dated rent cheques.

Don’t get me wrong. There have been lots of lovely interludes this summer; a few stolen days at a friend’s cottage including a canoe out on the lake calm and clear enough that we could see huge fish swimming far below, a meal out in Ottawa with both my ex and all of my kids gathered together at a new place that was so much fun my middle son’s fingers were literally wiggling with anticipation as he waited his turn to order off the tablet, a day spent with old friends from Deep cycling near here on a studio art tour, another day off canoeing with my old canoe group exploring the flooded bays and islands above the dam across the lake from my house… my middle son has visited me several times, and I’ve made trips back to Deep to go to friends’ retirement dinners and stopped in to see old friends at the same time, sat and drank coffee with Rick, and tea with Jane, and white wine with Shelley…  I’ve been into Ottawa often to visit my oldest, and I’ve made it to almost every dragon boat practice here in town, and the few hours that I have spent each evening with my youngest have been lovely, and I have, finally, acquired a phone, and have been making up for lost time calling people, and, sometimes, I get long newsy e-mails that make my day…

...but there have also been times when I just let the hours flow by in a very aimless fashion.

I am, without doubt, on hold.

But I am not - which is most worrying of all – at all worried about it.

Burke's Beach

Drawn Back to Burke's Beach

Wednesday evening was my friend Steve’s retirement dinner so I drove down to Deep in the morning in time to go out for coffee with Rick and co.. In the afternoon I did a few local chores before being drawn back out to Burke’s beach. There I walked out to the point and, as is my habit, further along the shore, as deep into the following bay as the sun allows; I turn around when the bluff approaches close enough to the beach so as to put it into shadow. Back at the point I swam out to the raft and lay in the warm sun, the wood rough against my back, and tried to analyze what it is exactly about this place that I like so much. It was, as usual, almost deserted, just one young family playing further up the beach, but still, even without the comfort of familiar people, I felt totally suffused with peace by the place itself. I like the openness, the way you can see for miles, the plethora of so many elemental features; sun, air, water, sand, and forest, I like the fact that it all seems so clean, natural and pristine, it’s as if mother nature herself has afforded me the privilege to visit her favourite refuge. It was almost completely calm and the surface of the water was a solid dark green colour, a reflection of the hills, and that seemed important somehow, though why exactly escaped me. (I also like it when it’s windy there with dark grey cloud fronts bearing down turning the colour of the water into a fierce navy colour flecked with whitecaps and the wind whipping the surface of the sand so it bites your ankles and erases any footprints.) A family of ducks swam right past the raft, and, as usual, one lone kayaker was paddling off in the distance the flashing of his white paddle blades a silent heartbeat. It is, to me, the most beautiful place in the world. When I am travelling and meet foreigners, frequently Germans, who ask where in Canada I am from and what it’s like there, and often comment in the same breath that the Rockies are spectacular, I tell them that I live close to Algonquin Park, because that’s somewhere that they might have heard of, and try to explain that though the scenery is not as dramatic as out west it has its own lovely gentle wildness that grows on you. In one of my favourite coming of age books there is a scene where the young heroine walks with her boyfriend, who had just that day come out from a nine month stint in jail, along a breakwater. They stop, sit, and don’t even talk, just look out at the sea and drink in the view content merely with the exquisiteness of being alone together for the first time in so long. She says afterwards she can’t explain it, that she just became ‘undone, in the Victorian sense of the word’, and that word, undone, is the best I can do to describe what it’s like for me there. To have so much space, the heady scent of freshwater saturating the air, the gentle silence all around broken by nothing but the occasional sound of lapping waves - I am at a loss to explain the bliss it brings. And I’m always only visiting; I can’t stay there forever, which makes it special too. It wasn’t even a perfect day, a thin layer of high clouds were slowing drifting in from the west, and yet as I lay on the raft with the dark green water spreading out all around the peace and contentment that filled me seemed positively spiritual, and, unfortunately, totally indescribable or explicable… Even when I was there, and thinking about it, I couldn’t find words or logic to express, even in a vague and ambiguous manner, the total serenity of the whole experience, so there is no way I can do so here, trying to write about it, a whole day and a hundred km removed from it all.