Passporting

I have just received my new passport, and I love it so much I am carrying it around in my pocketbook wherever I go. Rationally, I know that there is not one chance in five gazillion that I will need it driving the highways and back roads of my world, or when I bus to New York to see my kids, or fly to California to visit a friend.

But I can’t help it. It is beautiful. The old one was all business: rules and regulations, warnings about mutilations and alterations. This one starts with the preamble to the Constitution, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union . . . ” I am already feeling proud to be an American passport bearer.

I have only had three passports in my life: one issued in 1972, a year after I was married. We backpacked around Europe for a few months between real work in Boston and living off the land in Mt. Chase—now that’s real work.

I am 21 in the photograph on my first passport. My eyes are sparkly, lit from inside, the way my daughter still describes them. The world is “my oyster.” I know I’m about to pry it open and find the mother lode of clichéd pearls.

That passport expired in 1977 and I didn’t replace it until 1999 after the marriage died. An old friend was taking me to Europe—the Netherlands, Belgium, France. It’s intended to be a great adventure. I have known this well-traveled friend forever. So I rushed out to get the little perfect-sized photos and get another key to the world.

I am happy in this photo, too.

Both trips, however, were pretty disastrous. The first because it was the first time I had ever been that far away from home. Plus, would you please tell me what would possess a person to choose to make their first foray to Europe, with a backpack and little money, in the middle of winter?

The second failure was all about expectations and lack of communication. I’m a go-into-the-palace lingerer. My friend is a drive-by traveler. I’m an I-love-the-energy-of-the-crowd person and my friend loves to roam deserted predawn streets.

One can learn a lot from “failures.” Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what a great traveler I’ll be with this new passport with the cheery pink-and-orange cover I bought. Not a day goes by that I don’t look through it. Across the top of every page is a quotation—from Daniel Webster, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy. Dwight Eisenhower says, “Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.” You get the idea.

I love them all, but what I love most is that the only quote from a woman comes from someone I never heard of—someone no one I asked had ever heard of. All of us matter, it says to me. All of us make a difference; all of us can become our best selves. Anna Julia Cooper was born a slave in 1858; she earned her PhD at the Sorbonne in 1924 and became a teacher, a scholar, a writer. Here on the second-to-the-last page of my third passport, she tells the world thousands of times a day, “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”

I’m packing already.

Annaliese Jakimides has new work forthcoming in the journals Consequence and Off the Coast.