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...
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...
