Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,75
within six months.
I said to Hugh, “Six months?”
“That’s at the latest,” he told me. “For all you know, it could come next week.”
I sent off my passport at the beginning of June, and when, by mid-July, it had still not been returned, I had to cancel a reading in Italy. When it did not come by the end of July, I had to forfeit a nonrefundable Eurostar ticket to France. Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling. When I explained it to people face-to-face, I would see their eyes glazing over, and when I explained it over the phone, I could feel them turning on their computers and checking their retirement accounts.
Without my passport, I was stuck in the country I had immigrated to. And all because of some drug addict in Hawaii. While he got high on the beach, I endured one of the wettest, coldest summers on record. Growing up in North Carolina, I got my fill of hot, sticky weather. Ninety-degree heat does nothing for me—I hate it. A little warmth wouldn’t have hurt, though, a couple of days when I didn’t have to wear both a sweater and a long undershirt, these beneath a hideous plastic poncho. I honestly hadn’t known it was possible to rain that much. It was so bad in West Sussex that baby birds were drowning in their nests. Even frogs were dying. Frogs! Our Italy trip was to be a reading with a few days of vacation tacked on. But instead of driving through the Piedmont with Hugh and our friend Eduardo, I walked the roads surrounding our house, wearing knee-high Wellingtons and watching as bloated slugs floated by.
Everyone but me seemed to be going places.
Once a week, in an attempt to break the monotony, Hugh and I would grab our jumbo golf umbrellas and slog down the road to the pub, where we’d catch up on the local news. One of our few neighbors who had not yet flown to Spain had her house broken into while she was upstairs asleep. The thief stole her purse and, after discovering that her car keys were in it, took her Audi as well. In response, the local police suggested that, as a precautionary measure, we all start sleeping with our keys.
Had they responded this way in France or America, it wouldn’t have surprised me, but wasn’t everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn’t every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That’s the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There’s even Edith Pargeter’s Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way. But now, almost nine hundred years later, the solution is to sleep with our keys? “How’s that for progress?” I said to Hugh as we waded home. “I mean, why not just tell us to sleep in our cars?”
In mid-October I was scheduled to fly to the U.S., and then on to thirty cities as part of a lecture tour. Canceling it was out of the question, so in early September I called the Home Office and demanded that they send my passport back. This meant canceling my application and losing the five hundred dollars that accompanied it, but what choice did I have? The person I spoke to on the phone explained that the return process could take up to twenty working days. She also said that if I left for the States, there was no guarantee the British government would let me back into the U.K.
I hung up thinking there were worse things than being deported from England. What’s with a country that takes six months to replace a sticker in somebody’s passport, this when it’s all right there on the computer? Then I thought of other things I don’t like about the place: the littering, the public drunkenness, the way they say “Jan” instead of January. There are problems everywhere, of course. It’s just that without my passport I can’t adequately appreciate them.
A few days into my tour of the U.S., someone on Oahu came upon a computer bag with a checkbook and a passport in it. He or she then took them to