This week’s little story, though still in progress, is a very happy one so far and, if nothing else, allows me to approach my weekly scrawl in a wholly upbeat mood. Amidst all the forest fires, drowning migrants, and legal indictments, the story is a reminder of how many nice people, some of them strangers, one stills runs into on a daily basis. It is also in some ways an autumnal story. For summer is winding down, and already, amid the continuing heat and almost daily thunderstorms, I begin to experience that autumn-tinged, slightly wistful feeling that began with my first view of Princeton in the late summer of 1961, when I arrived to begin a doctoral program. At the time, I couldn’t understand the wistful part. A lot of good things were happening. I had just completed three glorious years at Oxford, glorious in part because I had done so much traveling and “goofing off,” as we then called a relaxed attitude towards the more serious invitation of academic work. But now I was getting ready to be very serious indeed. The plan, successfully carried out, was to complete the comprehensive general examination within a single year, get married when that had been accomplished, and begin immediately on a doctoral dissertation (subject as yet unknown) before setting off a professorial career I knew not where. Expectation but uncertainty: the very stuff of youth.
More than sixty years later things are very different—save for the weather. All of life has become more contingent and slow-moving. One knows pretty much what to expect. Just at the moment our expectations are high. We have tickets—rather expensive ones I have to say—for a flight from Newark to Nice over the night of September first. Our destination is a lovely farmhouse in Salernes (Var), the sunny property of our dear friend Andrew Seth, who for the past three years has gathered together a house party including several ancient retainers who forged our associations together sixty years ago at Jesus College, Oxford. I have written about this Provençal mini-paradise place before. And while one always hopes there might be more yet to come, there is also a certain strain of octogenarian realism that sensibly focuses on the present.
One night just about two months ago I suddenly awoke stricken by a night terror. Dream or reality? Surely you know the feeling. You just discovered your wallet is missing. Your old car has just broken down in the middle of the night out in the deep country. You slept through the exam. That sort of thing, only worse. I actually got up in the middle of the night and crept as silently as I could to the desk drawer in Joan’s study where we are wont to keep various seldom-used but important documents, including our passports. My worst fears didn’t need confirming; though shallowly covered in denial, I knew what I was going to find. My passport had expired three weeks earlier! I could see this even by the faint light of a single bulb and without my glasses. Expiry date: May 20, 2023.
People were not traveling much during Covid. But I’d actually seen an article in the paper about how now everybody was wanting to travel, and to travel next Tuesday. The minimum wait time for passports was nine weeks! (I later would learn that that was the expedited service, with an extra fee of two hundred and seventy-two dollars.) The backlog was something like pi rounded out to three lines of twelve-point type, but without the decimal point. The reality of the situation dulled my senses. Yes, I know that Amazon has next day delivery, but we are talking now about the government of the United States of America. As I lay sleepless through the dawn, I tried to practice in my mind how to convey this news to my spouse. At nine o’clock I was at the camera shop buying two very expenses photographs of my very pale and morose visage. At nine thirty I was at the post office in the little village of Kingston, N. J., headquarters of our nearest official passport agent, Tari Pantaleo, and, as it happens, one of the nicest people God ever made. Ms. Pantaleo did not exactly put me at ease. That would have been impossible. But she was clearly deeply experienced with the flustered old man syndrome. She was pretty confident that—bearing in mind the aforementioned two hundred and seventy-two dollars part—I would yet be able to frolic in Provence. Since in my fluster I had taken off for Kingston without my wallet, I had the further humiliation—after going through the psychodrama of imagining I had lost it--of having to phone my already sufficiently annoyed wife to ask her if she could possibly, pretty please, drive up to Kingston with it.
Enter stage left very nice person number two. That would be Rekha Arapurakal, our long-time friend and travel agent. She told me that once the papers that Ms. P. had sent on to Philadelphia reached the passport office, I could reasonably hope to be supplied by email with a “tracking number,” and that once I had a tracking number, Cory Booker might be able to expedite matters further. Cory Booker?! Cory Booker is one of the United States senators from the State of New Jersey. He is an outstanding national figure. Of course in a state where the baseline for satisfactory senatorial performance is simply to remain unindicted, he would be a natural superstar under any circumstances. But that he could possibly be concerned with my expired passport was news to me. However, I did meet him once at a Rhodes Scholar thing, and I was game for a try. I went to his website and, sure enough, among the helpful services advertised on offer through his Newark office was the category “help with a governmental agency.” There was a telephone number listed. I called it, and nice person number three picked up the phone. I know only his first name—Zaire—but I’m putting him up for the Croix de Guerre with three oak-leaf clusters. Zaire was friendly. He was cautious, but also hopeful. Naturally there was a form I had to send him—in the post within the hour. A week later I had an email from Zaire. He had sent my information to the Passport Office in New Orleans! Why New Orleans, of all places? I thought (best case scenario) I would have to trek over to Philadelphia, and was dreading it. Then silence for about ten days. The wait was disquieting, but in my mind I established August 21st as official panic day, and did my best to postpone the anxiety. On August 9th I received an email notification informing me that a package addressed to me had been sent from New Orleans and arrived in Hot Springs, Arkansas on August 9th. Hot Springs! Arkansas! Who knew? This package would be delivered to me no later than 6 pm on Thursday, August 10th. In fact the passport arrived midmorning on that day. The new passport has some new security features, including a strange double photograph, half of which appears spectral and nearly transparent, marked by the pallor of terror. Looks pretty grim, but I’ve got fairly decent hair, considering.
I like to remind myself that our word travel has an alternative version of travail, the pains of childbirth, or (in the French) exertive work of any kind. All traveling was once hard traveling. Sometimes it still is, especially for the infirm and the elderly. Hospitality and hospitals, the venues of hospitality’s principal practice, were especially associated with those spiritually motivated travelers called pilgrims. Travelers can need a lot of help. I am not sure that I had ever before read the message from the Secretary of State printed within my passport. It is highly relevant to my experience, for it is itself a request for help. “The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.” How grateful I am that in a moment of need so many very capable and benevolent people arrived to help me.
