“I'm ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille,” I squinted to my red lipsticked pucker reflected in the bathroom mirror. Fully coiffed for my photo shoot I don a coat and hat and head to the town offices to renew my expiring passport during the highly anticipated Passport Fair sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service. The word “Fair” itself swirls intoxicating images of international food carts manned by peoples of diverse cultures, however when I arrive, there are only 2 leftover slices of cold pizza discarded by the staff and curled up next to some complimentary Home Cooking Guide calendars, Greetings From America coloring books and government issue crayons. A very friendly gaggle of postal workers greets all who enter – with forms, directions and answers to several improbable questions posed by the U.S. Department of Leaving and Re-Entering the Homeland.
While most will prepare for months to impress fellow alumni at high school reunions, I'll starve to get the perfect mug shot on the 10-year passport. Unrepentant vanity caused by the reality of this photo – the representation of the future me in retrospect of the current me – can send me to the gym, the hair stylist and a make up artist. It's a type of temporary insanity flamed by the vision of having to live with this image for an entire decade every time I'm required to whip out the little blue book to get through a maize of airport security checkpoints and sneering customs agents. Ten years is an unforeseeably long time – major physical changes will take place, especially in appearance – and from mid-fifties to mid-sixties, aging is serious transformational stuff.
My expiring passport portrait reflected a frumpy, unhappy dark-haired woman ready to escape to anywhere from the throes of 13 years of rural, provincial-thinking upstate New York. My demeanor and physical appearance changed dramatically for the better after moving back to Crested Butte and I wanted this new passport to represent that transformation back to normality... or at least the youthful glow of perpetual childhood reinstated by living amongst my own joyous, free-spirited kind.
The passport application has some stumpers... flawed questions that seem to make no sense or have no possible accurate answer. For example, how do I correctly answer something as complex as “hair color” when they won't accept Clairol as an answer and it isn't multiple choice or “all of the above?” Definitely not written by a woman, although the paperwork didn't require divulging weight info – probably because someone figured out that body mass changes over the decade life of a passport and people are going to unabashedly lie about their poundage anyway.
But the question that really sent me into a tizzy was the entire section about the former spouse. “Were you ever married?” seems logical enough along with the numerous spaces provided to write in all your aliases, however, requiring a divorcee to recall the ex's birth date, birth place and “Date of most recent marriage” is traumatic – especially if the divorce was finalized 3 decades ago and thousands of dollars later in therapy just to forget all that information. Since I couldn't fit the Ex's last 5 marriages into the little box provided, I moved on.
I think about my grandparents, whose passports in the early 1900s were solely for immigration purposes. No stamps to recall adventures in exotic places, no visas for play, but the prospect of a new life and a golden future, hard earned in the young, promising America.
I gladly hand over my check for $120 to the smiling postmaster who asks, “So, where are you going?”
“Everywhere,” I dreamily visualize distant shores as I walk back into the blizzard of white.
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