Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Tribute to a passport

Dear Passport,

I’m sorry, but I had to replace you today. It wasn’t me, but my government, who said your time is up, that your expiration date was approaching later this year. I went to the American embassy here in Nairobi and picked up a new blue booklet full of crisp, blank sheets.

But I do want to thank you for serving me so well for nearly a decade. I got you in 1998 in Chicago, when I was more youthful, before I was about to embark on a wonderful return to Zimbabwe for the World Council of Churches assembly there, preceded by a tour of South Africa and around Zimbabwe with my parents. Since then, you have come with me on an amazing career and life of travel around the world. You have accompanied me on every one of those trips, from Israel to Indonesia and India, from Bangkok to Brussels and Bangladesh. You have been a faithful travel companion, always staying close to me, often near my heart in the holder I wore around my neck. You smoothed the way every time when I arrived and left the many countries I have visited and were my very ticket to my entry and return home.

And you have been my very identity. You have indicated that I am an American citizen, with more freedom to travel and enter places than most people on the planet have. You have been the mark and brand that give me privileges that few other people enjoy – voting in and being a citizen of the most powerful and influential nation on earth, for one.

You are well worn now, and a couple years ago, you even graciously expanded for me so you could continue to serve me when I added more visa pages to you at the U.S. embassy in Bern, back in our old home of Switzerland. You show signs of age, of your full life, lived nearly to the maximum of a decade. The many stamps you contain in your pages are visible signs of your age but more importantly your worldliness. You plainly show you’ve been places in your life. From the top of the world above the Arctic Circle in Norway to the bottom of the world at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, you have gone to the ends of the earth. Now, it’s probably appropriate that you end your life in the middle, near the equator in Kenya.

I have a new travel companion who will go with me from now on. It’s different than you, but not necessarily better. Apparently it contains an electronic chip that will help identify me better. But in so many ways, because of where we’ve been together and what we’ve seen, you have been a description of a good part of my identity for the last third of my life or so.

You have four holes in you now that render you invalid, but I will hold on to you for the memories we share.

Love,

Stephen

1 comment:

Tim Frakes Productions said...

Great stuff Steven. I feel the same way. Can I post this on my site? I'd like to add a photo of the exterior of my passport.

Tim