Debating with myself whether I should clamp my new passport picture here ⇓…but won’t. Because I do not look like a person thrilled with my neighborhood US Post Office, which took that picture, and I was thrilled. They have made me Real.
BTW, did you realize the US Postal Service has been delivering mail since 1775? Yes, they have. The first Postmaster was Ben Franklin. This is the current one.
OK, now let’s return to my Reality. If you had the patience to read my plaint (sounds better than “rant”) against the current federal administration’s policy of forcing anyone who exists in the US to carry Real ID, I now want to report on what happened.
First, my brother happened. After he listened to me and learned my old passport had expired, he suggested going to my local post office to get a new one. “Just my post office?” I said, sounding, even to my own ears, like a provincial wimp overwhelmed by NYC.
I found the application on line, filled it out on line and printed it– well, wait no. I couldn’t print it because I have a new printer and my new cursed Windows 11 did not recognize my new printer, so before I could print I had to spend a couple of hours, no exaggeration, under my desk and the tangle of computer cables and cords therein. (Thereunder?) The problem wasn’t a cable problem but after diagnosing that, I spent a lot of time still under the desk with microclothes and my vaccuum cleaner because why not? Let’s take advantage of the multiple irritations and make the terroir pristine.
So I went in search of printer drivers and that landed me in the claws of Microsoft where I fought valiantly with loud curses for a couple of hours until I went back to HP and refused to let them direct me to Microsoft; just insisted “I want my printers drivers NOW and from YOU!”
That was exhausting. Late that evening, I succeeded in printing the passport application and made an appointment a week hence with my post office. Then I rested.
Decades ago I applied for my very first passport by standing on hours-long lines somewhere within the Art Deco halls of Rockefeller Center. This time, carrying a folder containing my paperwork, I strolled into a smallish, sunny rectangular room casually set up in a corner of my local post office. There was one other person there, a young man sitting on the window sill reading a book.
Less than two minutes later, the small lady who was the passport maestra appeared. At first she seemed strict, like a teacher of unruly children. She wasn’t. After I handed her my application and she determined I needed a photo, she had me sit on a low stool in front of a white cloth: the photography lab.
“Put your feet together,” she said. I did. Then I smiled. “No smiling,” she said, crisply. I disappeared my smile, but forgot to keep my eyes open. “Chin up!,” she said and took another photo, the peculiar copy of which is now sitting on my desk. Eyes open, chin up, mouth closed, hair rampant. (It grew too fast out of its gorgeous bob, went rogue and home management lost control of the situation.)
Then everything became fun and funny. Passport maestra is my new best friend, we had laughs, grim assessments of our current government, other post office people came in and hugged her, it was great.
The young man who’d been sitting on the window sill came forward to greet his mother who’d appeared to fund her son’s first passport. He glanced at a document he’d been given and said, “Ten years? It’s good for ten years?” Passport maestra confirmed that. And then he said, “And then I can renew it online, right?”
Passport Maestra, like a Greek oracle, gazed off more or less toward the White House and, with nearly imperceptible sarcasm, intoned, “Ten years is a long time. Things can change in ten years. We don’t know what will happen in ten years.”
My passport will arrive in a couple of weeks bearing with it my Reality.
P.S. Microsoft has not forgotten or forgiven my rebuke. Three or four times a day it smacks advisory warnings about my printer drivers plunk in the middle of my screen so that in order to continue what I’m doing I have to spend a couple of minutes clicking Xs like mad, saying “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”