My Passport
After nearly a decade, I said goodbye to a close travel companion.
My passport lived in my backpack in a pocket specially designed for it. It had an embossed leather cover that immigration agents routinely and thoughtlessly made me remove. On those occasions, when my passport was handed back to me, I would stand in front of the agent while I slowly and deliberately returned it to its rightful place in the protective cover.
“Stick to the man!”
My passport was always with me, ready on a moment’s notice and never forgotten. It was the “Large Passport” version that the United States issues to frequent travelers. The standard one has only 28 pages. Mine had 52. Alas, there were not enough pages to reach the ten-year expiration before the book was filled.
The first page has stamps from South Africa and Botswana – a safari trip to remember. The last page has stamps from both San Jose del Cabo and Guadalajara, Mexico. In between are memories from Australia, South Korea, Saint Kitts & Nevis, London, Paris, Thailand, Peru, Switzerland, Saint Lucia, Guatemala, Saint Barts, Colombia, Germany, Saint Vincent, the Grenadines, Costa Rica, Austria, Antigua and Barbuda, the Czech Republic, and Canada. (Although they threatened to deport me when I landed in Calgary because they didn’t appreciate my “stick it to the man” move. I thought they were supposed to be nice?)
I lost count of the stamps from Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Mexico, and Saint Martin. And this list does not include all the places that don’t stamp your passport, like Cuba and Liechtenstein. Nor does it include those islands where I might have failed to check in with the local authorities while cruising the Caribbean. There are other places I can’t remember.
Holding my old passport takes me back to all these places and the people I was with when we enjoyed them together. The decade of travel represented by these pages of visa stamps is a book waiting to be written, yet some of the stories are better left untold to protect the guilty (mostly me). It is enough that they exist in my memory and those of my companions.
My new passport is also the extra-large kind. It is shiny and blue with a new number that I have yet to memorize. My plan is to fill this one up even faster. I am eternally thankful that I filled my old passport before it expired. That meant I had to renew early and received my new one just before Donald Trump decided to put his picture in them.
I love traveling, but nothing is worth carrying around that asshole’s photo.
Stick it to the man!
