The renewal of my Passport

In August I am getting married and we have decided to honeymoon in Mexico. I am very much looking forward to this but leaving the country, or more importantly the prospect of being allowed to re-enter the United States has required the renewal of my passport.

My passport expires this month. How I am old enough to have something that is 'good' for ten years expire is still unbelievable to me. I was sixteen when I got my first passport. My family planned a wonderful trip to Paris and all four of us needed new passports. My sister, being under the age of sixteen received a passport that would expire in five years. But because I had turned sixteen earlier that year, I was eligible for the real thing. An adult passport that would not expire for ten years! It seemed like an eternity at the time, especially considering that the expiration date read 2010. That honestly seemed like a futuristic, space travel date to me back then. So we went to the passport office in Stamford and applied for the books. We received them, just in time apparently, as I remember that we traveled to France two weeks before April vacation from school. My picture is absolutely ridiculous but honestly, ten years later, I don't really look any different.

Here is the original.

 

Although my looks have generally stayed the same, so much has changed. What I didn't know when I received that passport and went to Paris with my family was that would be the one and only time we would travel across the sea out of our country together. It would be the last time we left the country, probably left the state, our last trip, last vacation as a family. Cancer hit my family like a ton of bricks and before I was eighteen, we had lost my father to it.

The last decade has seen so many changes in my life, I can hardly view them all in one thought. So strange that I am now able to view life in terms of decades. Until recently, I always looked back on time in school years or semesters. No longer seeing my life segmented into blocks of fifteen weeks has taken some adjustment. I think that came from the desire to continue that life which had become so comfortable. I was good at being a college student and then suddenly, the robed vice president of my university proclaimed what he assumed was my name over a loudspeaker (it will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that it was not my name at all), handed me a piece of paper and I was supposed to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. This, I believe is why you are "supposed" to complete your undergraduate experience in four years...otherwise you'll never want to move on into your "real life." I'd rather postpone the inevitable, thank you.

But I digress...

While reading through the instruction for passport renewal (which I read at least ten times for fear of mistake), I discovered that one is supposed to give a "neutral" expression in the photo. I suppose that makes sense seeing that most people do not flash a smile while going through customs. However, I find it a strange way to, for lack of a better word, "create" one's identity. Essentially that is what a passport is. It is the only document that can always be used to identify yourself. Gone are the days of only needing a passport to travel. Try leaving (or re-entering) the country without one, applying for a job, a marriage licence. You need to prove that you are who you say you are and our government has deemed a passport the way to do so. I find it ironic that when I'm feeling like I'm in a time of my life where I'm trying to find my identity, I am forced to renew the one document that is my identity. On top of that, this will only be my identity until August when I will become someone else. I do not believe much of myself will change but to the rest of the world, I will be someone else. Someone's wife, a Mrs., a Currier. I will change my name once I am married and with that change the name on every tangible thing that proves who I am. What a strange concept.

But yet again, I digress...

We arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport on a chilly March morning. That flight; that interminable flight from New York to Paris was when I discovered the true meaning of claustrophobia and the fact that a overnight flight of eight hours combined with a seven hour time difference makes it feel like it has literally taken you days to get somewhere. Regardless, we had made it there and I was excited to use my brand new passport to get through customs. What I expected and what happened when I forced open the stiff pages of the little book were entirely different. Apparently, I assumed that the customs agent would just know how much of a sentimentalist I am and open my little book to page one. Then he would place the stamp that I knew I could only get where I was carefully in the first little box on the page. He would do this so I could always open my little blue book to page one and see where I had been. I was wrong.

This is the result of what actually happened.

I'm not sure it is really noticeable in the picture but not only is the stamp on page ten, it is in the middle of the page and upside-down! How disappointing. Every time I looked at it from that day on, it upset me. Why, could that agent not have taken the extra second to find the first page and put the stamp where I would have liked it? Now I realize, it is because, 1. he did not care about where I wanted the stamp and 2. he did not have the time to place it just so. But if only he had.

And now I have given up that passport. I don't know why the government needs it. The sentimentalist in me wants to keep it, forever. So I won't forget. But I have sent it away to Philadelphia where someone I've never met will process my application; process me. Then someone will most likely shred that passport, shred page ten with my one upside-down stamp and issue me a new one, a new identity. An identity that will bring me to the age of thirty-six. Again, I feel as I felt at sixteen, that that time is an eternity away, that there is such little possibility that that expiration date can even exist. But it can, and it will and as the little life experience I've had tells me, it will be here all to soon. Who will I be at thirty-six? Will I have found out who I am? Will I have an identity?

Here is my "new" identity.

Thanks for reading.

Post. Script. April 17 I wrote this before I sent in my application for my passport. Much to my surprise, the day I received my new passport in the mail, I also received an envelope containing the old one. The government punched holes in it making it invalid for travel, however, as you can expect, I'm very happy to have it back. I'm happy that page 10 was not shredded or lost in some government file. I'll get to keep that passport and remember those ten years of my life.