The Demands Of Travel

While applying for my passport, I studied the crappy photograph from my last one, a time in which eyebrow maintenance was a concept as foreign as Sanskrit and waited while the postal worker checked to make sure I'd filled out my forms correctly. When did you get divorced? she asked. I had absolutely no idea and had to think back to an approximate. There was a red-haired Russian woman filling out her form and said, That's wonderful. I don't think I'll ever forget mine. You're very lucky. She struggled over her forms because she had to do a special expedite and only had three checks left. I have to get everything perfect. I cannot mess this up. Man, that's the position I was usually in, driving around on an empty tank of gas without directions. The postal worker took my pictures, a hideous grueling activity in the morning and said, You can come in every ten years and see what you look like in comparison, holding my new picture to my old one. That, the Russian woman said, is a form of cruelty. But I felt pretty good -- I'd used enough make up not to be horrified and fared well next to the undefined teenager I once was. And it had been well over ten years.

But the fact was that I'd never once used the first passport. The world of travel my mother had imagined for me when she paid for it hadn't materialized, bending to the demands of a different kind of life, a circumscribed one of enclosed spaces. I got to thinking about the whole relentless march of time thing and where I might find myself in ten years, what I might be doing. All I could hope is that I'd have been somewhere exotic, making the whole get my ass out of bed and fill out forms thing worthwhile. Alas the mind is pretty exotic and the demands of travel rigorous, but perhaps the lure of something beyond what I have seen will sing a siren song louder than anything I can already imagine.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival. " Iggy Pop

Cocktail Hour
Drinking music suggestion: Summer Stock Judy Garland

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday!