You can get a passport in one day in NYC; it is possible.
On this day at 8 am, I stood in line with other anxious souls outside the US Passport Center on NYC’s Hudson Street, praying for the doors to open.
My son Abadi and I had gotten an invitation to a bar mitzvah. Not the usual DJ-dance-floor-strobe-lights-mass-of-jumping-13-year-olds bar mitzvah; this was to be the parents’ reclaiming of this rite of passage, this ritual - adults and children gathering with meaning.
I lean into gatherings nowadays - or try to. I lean into rituals.
Rituals help. They mark thresholds crossed. Andrew’s funeral, the celebration of his life, the spreading of his ashes into a river with loved ones helped me mark his death. It’s up to us to mark meaning in our lives, and rituals mark meaning.
However.
The bar mitzvah was taking place in Montreal, and we live in NY City.
This ritual required an updated passport, which I did not have.
Passport by definition: that which allows one to reach a desired goal.
A ritual must be part passport then…but the general goal setting is presently too much for me. I’m just learning to tolerate the immutable fact that what I desire most is impossible; I want Andrew back. Impossible.
So, other than short-term to-do lists, my future is still a big fat shrug.
But getting my passport renewed might be manageable.
However.
The bar mitzvah in Montreal was taking place tomorrow night.
Why attempt this?
Andy and I had planned to go to Montreal many times; for fun, for Canadian French coffee, see friends. It’s not that far from NYC, and we’d never been. But we’d kept having to cancel. First Covid. Then Andy’s passport expired, then Abadi’s...oh, yeah.
Then Andrew died.
What I loved about our former family vacations was that we’d go to a foreign city and suddenly, we three fundamentally needed each other. For navigation, for finding food, for sharing delight and discovery of how people lived and did things in this strange place—we got closer. We proved to each other we were there!
But since Andrew’s death, I have a pretty difficult time taking “a vacation”.
Even the term gives me pause.
Not that I couldn’t use a break, every second. From the longing. The confusions. Ceaseless daily mental adjustments; stopping thoughts midstream. Andy’s gone, you don’t need to save leftovers for him, he’s gone, you can get rid of that massive cast iron skillet that’s too heavy to lift, he’s gone, he won’t miss it! He doesn’t need those big Sorel snow boots nor his fishing rods, his ties, his shaving cream, that extra pack of razors -he definitely doesn’t need his mouthguard! He won’t share that salmon you're buying, that cheese. Put back his favorite olives!
He’s gone, he’s gone.
He’s gone.
These new thoughts lay down new neural pathways that rewire my brain to build a new sense of safety and purpose in my life without him. Ok, I learned that in a book. But it’s helped explain things: it’s not brain fog, it’s my brain working super hard to remap and readjust!
And accept reality. It’s exhausting if nothing else.
But of course, there’s a lot else…
Sigh.
I don’t feel I can afford “a vacation.”
If I take a break, who’s gonna mind the store?
And how?
Book a hotel room, for myself, by myself?
What about Abadi?
At 14, he’s getting too big to share a bed with me, even a room with me - he can palm my entire head in one hand. His feet are three times the size of mine. I come up to his shoulder.
Also.
Deep down, I feel…vacations are for families.
Two grownups plus one to four or more kids.
Mom and Dad. Mom and Mom. Dad and Dad. Stepmom, stepdad, on and on…
The kind you see in Carnival Cruise Ads. It’s true! I think that! DANG!
I yell at myself: “That is so old-fashioned, Mary!” I insist: “We are a family, Mary. We are. You and Abadi are a family! And don’t forget Oreo! One mom, one kid, one dog. And families take vacations."
So, when this invite came to a place we’d never been; I decided.
albeit last minute,
if I could get a new passport,
to demonstrate my embrace of our new, smaller family,
Abadi and I would go to this DJ-less bar mitzvah in Montreal.
Who cares if it’s tomorrow night?
We’ll wake up and drive 8 hours straight, accounting for breaks and border crossing, and arrive around 6 pm. The evening would have just begun. It could work.
Except.
This is smaller, but.
Every place I’d go before, I’d text Andy. Constant rudimentary travel updates:
on plane
upgraded
delayed
mechanical failure
taking off
bye 4 now
landed!
Most importantly:
I’m safe! I’m here.
Now, going any extended distance with my son pings a twang of fear along my spine…cuz I am to be the only one responsible, in charge of passports, luggage, tickets, itinerary, money, guidance. Know how. RESPONSIBLE.
Me? Just me?
You. JUST YOU.
And, no one to tell: We made it!
It’s an open galaxy of silence, no one to send out your safety to.
Except God. The one truly responsible, if you look at God that way.
"Hey God? Um...I'm here!"
I’m getting way ahead of myself.
Have to get the passport first.
It was a surprisingly fast-moving line on Hudson Street. I got in, sailed through metal detectors, and stood in a second short line upstairs in less than ten minutes. As I waited I looked down at the expired passport in my hands. The last time I renewed my passport was ten years ago… If I’d known then what was coming, that Andrew would be gone for the next time I’d need to renew… what?
If I’d known then, then what?
What? I didn’t know.
I looked at my expired picture. I’m smiling, assured. My cheeks are flushed, my lips are red, and my blouse is a multi-colored, flowered affair. I look happy, fresh, bright. Part of a whole. My smug expression smirks,
"I’m a mom! Of a sweet little 4-year-old! My husband Andrew is taking us to Turks and Caicos. Yes! Life! Certain of it!"
As I flip through the booklet, fresh grief seeps out, all the places we had gone during the last ten years…
Mexico. Spring Breaks. The beach, the warm, breezy resort Abadi and you loved with the swim-up bar for ordering Shirley Temples, the giant pool slide, and the Mexican hot chocolate at breakfast.
Amsterdam. Remember renting bikes in that Green Shop? I kept pulling Abadi’s six-year-old hands off the wall of “goodies”, all the hemp candy in green packaging he thought was apple flavored. The bikes were painted green, too, and seemed as if hemp itself had been wrapped around their handlebars. Abadi kept pace between us on that city’s crazy fast lanes of bike traffic, speeding over bridges and intricate canals, and no one wearing helmets. We wheeled through the giant sculptures in Vondelpark, past the playgrounds where parents sat on the side chatting with golden beers and smoking, blissfully at ease with toddlers dumping buckets of sand over other toddlers’ heads; we swirled around jazz musicians softly playing, some up in the trees even. It’s Amsterdam, after all. We biked an hour and a half out to windmills; where Abadi curled up in your lap eating a giant stroopwaffle for the camera.
Ethiopia. Where we took Abadi the following year. He lost his bottom front tooth in the customs security line and we, following the local African custom, threw it up on a thatched roof in the village. When we got back home, he found a note from the family’s personal Tooth Fairy, AKA Andrew, under his pillow:
Dear Abadi,
I have been looking for your tooth for a while! First in Ethiopia, among the Simian Hills of Gondor, where you‘d hiked recently with your parents. Met that same flock of wild baboons! Thought I’d find it in the Amsterdam airport among the duty-free Toblerone bars; finally, gave up. I’ll pay you anyway, you’ve been good. $5!”
xx Tooth Fairy
I gotta look up.
Oh, man. Wasn’t quite prepared for all that. To see all that.
Too much. Too much to say goodbye to.
Breathe, Mary. Breathe. Get back to the line, back to the present.
I look at my passport application with my new passport picture paper clipped to it. You should see the contrast, Andy. I’d gotten a hasty photo taken the night before at the grim UPS store around the corner, just before it closed; encroaching dark outside, and the lighting was terrible. The store always has a few long bulbs out, and the remaining fluorescents compete with the darkening day, and somehow they both lose or rather, surrender to each other.
My hair was stringy and unkempt, and I wore an olive green shirt, which I thought would bring out my hazel eyes but instead, melded with the lackluster lighting. I have a gray-green pall, and the chilly overhead bulbs cast shadows underneath my brow, my nose, my chin, and hollow out my cheeks.
All my new wrinkles; I had tried smiling without showing teeth, which is difficult for me, and instead, I’m wearing the half-hearted smirk I wore in my elementary school photos, which my dad always insisted I retake on retake picture day, and this time, smile!
Maybe you’d just shake your head gently and say, “Oh, Mary. You’re beautiful! “ And give me a sweet, warm hug...
Yeah. You would do that.
I’m next. I closed the old passport. Must give up the old to get the new, isn’t that the truth of life? My life, anyway. I looked at the clerk a little helplessly. He saw my distress and said gently,
“You know, you’ll get it back. We send it back to you. It’s not like you’ll never see it again.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.” I handed it over with my application.
“Just come back after lunch. AFTER lunch, not before ok? And the new one’ll be ready.”
“After lunch? That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Why does it usually take 6 months?”
He gave me a weary side eye that said,
“Lady, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”, handed me a stamped receipt with 1:30 pm on it.
WOW.
If you want to get outta the US by tomorrow, an extra $60 bucks is extremely reasonable for speeding up this process by 5 months and 29 days, don’t ya think?
I returned at 1:20, and sure enough, at 1:35 pm I walked back out onto Hudson Street with a brand new passport in my hand.
My phone dinged - a text from a couple who can't make it to Montreal last minute. Would we like their Airbnb, all paid for? Right in trendy Mile End, above a bakery famous for croissants. No pets, though. Another text - my upstairs neighbors affirm they will gladly take Oreo for the weekend.
Obstacles are clearing out of the way like the parting of the Red Sea.
What about my latent fear of being the only one responsible?
I don’t know. Suddenly, it seems irresponsible not to go…
I decide.
We’re going on our own tiny-family-Montreal-bar-mitzvah vacation. My fear will slink into the backseat, making sure I can see her scowling in my rearview mirror, deriding my every lane shift and a SLOW DOWN! every time I exceed the speed limit.
But.
I think she has to get out at the border.
She didn’t renew her passport.
Andy, we’re finally going to Montreal.
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