While I wait, for the second time this weekend, to fly to England, allow me to tell you a story.
Friday two weeks past I celebrated a birthday, my first and probably last non-trivial fifth power natal commemoration. To treat myself on that special day, I went to the RMV, what Bay Staters call their Bureau of Vehicular Regulatory Perdition. This was not purely for pleasure: my Hospitality State driver's license was due to expire on my birthday, and I was unable to renew online. (Gone are the days when I could fill in a web form, input my credit card information, and receive from the Magnolian DMV a newly laminated identity card, sans signature and photo, holographically embossed with the phrases "Valid without Photo", "Valid without Signature" -- a treasured novelty possession I was loathe to relinquish the last time I renewed my license in person.)
Relatively proximate to our house is the Watertown Mall RMV branch, just fifteen minutes' bike ride away, albeit an automobile and highway fraught ride. Having no teaching duties the day before my birthday, I planned to spend Thursday morning getting the new license. I filled in the paperwork at home (print your own PDFs), collected the requisite proofs of identity, citizenship, and residency (old license, passport, utility bill), and biked out to Watertown, careful to secure my documents in my zippered vest pocket, and to bring reading material (How Fiction Works) -- for it was sure to be a long wait.
The route to the mall uniformly has more commuter traffic than most stretches of my usual commute, passes by the offices of WGBH and the New Balance warehouse, and passes over the Mass Pike. The day was sunny and clear, but very, very windy, and at times each turn of the pedals seemed a tachi-ai against the wind. I made it to the mall area, but didn't see the RMV where I expected it, so I pulled out my trusty iPhone and asked Google Maps to steer me to my goal. I was only a few hundred feet off. The RMV, it turns out, is the anchor store of the waning (decript) half of the mall. And anchor the mall it does. Twenty minutes before ten, the RMV still secured by a steel portcullis, a line of two hundred supplicants already snaked through the main hallway and out to the rear parking lot. I took my place at the tail and began to read. The gates clanged open and the line crept forward. Halfway to threshold, I checked that my papers were in order. Application forms, check. Old license, check. Electricity bill, check. Passport, ....?
No passport.
Not in the vest pockets. Not in the bike pannier I carried as ersatz backpack. Not on the floor in the mall. Not at the dinky rack where I'd locked my bike. Repeated searches produced the same null result.
Best case scenario thinking: Had I left it at home? I called M. just as she was rushing to Brandeis to teach. She quickly checked the most likely places. Not on the desk. Not in the lockbox. Not on the table. Not in my normal dumping spot for pocket paraphernalia. No luck, must dash.
Damnit.
Maybe I dropped it. Probably when I pulled out my iPhone to check directions. I returned to the bus stop where I'd oriented myself. Nothing there.
I retraced my steps further, eyes to the ground, walking my bike the two miles back to the apartment. There was nothing to see, just broken glass and rusty car bits, the detritus of old collisions. Some newsprint swirled in eddies of wind, reminding me that chances of recovery were miniscule if I had dropped it. Most likely it had blown away, maybe even onto the Turnpike.
A thorough search of the house, including ransacking every paperwork repository, turned up no trace of the passport.
This presented a problem. In two weeks I was scheduled to fly to England, where I would meet up with M. and attend the nuptials of our friends E. & J. This was not a trip to be missed, not at all.
Could I obtain a replacement riki-tick? Maybe. The State Department's website insisted that I report my passport lost immediately, so that it could be decommissioned and invalidated for travel. Then I would have to reapply, not for a passport renewal, but for an entirely new passport. All supporting documents, photos, etc., starting from scratch. Social security card, birth certificate, utility bills, and two forms of current photo identification. Id est, valid state-issued driver's license.
No driver's license, no passport. No passport, no driver's license.
And now we see that Mr. Heller has been ghostwriting this narrative.
But he's relaxed a bit in the afterlife. There are exceptions to the rule these days.
To get a license, I could redo my paperwork, take a different set of identifying documents to the RMV (birth certificate in lieu of passport to prove citizenship), surrender my old license, and hope that the bureaucracy would be mercifully expeditious in this particular circumstance. Estimated wait time for a new license: two weeks. Until then, no valid ID.
To get a passport, I could request an emergency hearing at the regional passport issuing office (luckily located in Boston) and bring U. S. citizens who have known me for at least two years to attest and certify that I am who I claim to be, upon pain of imprisonment. So I would have to get my pal J. and his wife M. (a different J., a different M.) to take off work and wait in some dim, claustrophobic holding pen downtown in order to sign an affidavit swearing that I am indeed that dude who lost his passport. And I would have to pay a considerable sum to have the passport hearing, with no guarantee of success.
But first, I would have to deregister my passport. Should be easy enough, just call this toll-free number. And wait. And wait. And wait.
Forget it, I had to go to work.
To be continued …
