passport
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.
Let’s meet in person. IRL. Friday, April 25th at Stories Books and Cafe, Echo Park, Los Angeles. 6pm-8pm. There will be cake. And I will be in conversation with one of my all-time favorite writers, one of my best friends, my Taurus sister, and “one of our great American intellectuals” (as noted by the Los Angeles Times), MYRIAM GURBA.
For more dates in Los Angeles, keep on reading...
In the past two weeks, we put our fourteen-year-old in the care of teachers and adult chaperones as part of a group of eighty-six people who went on an educational tour of Japan for nearly ten days.
The trip was financed over the course of a year. We agreed to send this kid to Japan back in March 2024. Every two weeks since then, we made a substantial payment to the tour company, and friends and family also chipped in to make the whole thing possible.
Since November 2024, it’s like I was growing a new layer of concern about what March 2025 might look like. Then in January of this year, more layers of concern began building in me as we started hearing about aviation disasters, near-misses, and firings of FAA staff. Masses of concerns, coming from every direction, everyday, thickening.
I’m someone who hasn’t done a lot of traveling in my life. Mostly it’s been an issue of money. Sending this kid on a trip of this magnitude and expense has made me think a lot about what it means to travel, to move freely about the world. And of course, the recent news is a consistent reminder that truly anything could happen.
In 1985, I was twelve years old, and I got my first passport. I don’t recall if I was supposed to travel in the summer of 1985 or the summer of 1986, but the plan was to join my friend (“Abigail” in my books) on her annual summer trip to Germany to stay with her grandparents. The trip might have been one or even two months long. The fact that my parents were willing to facilitate this is kind of mind-blowing to me now. My father had traveled a lot when he was in the army in the 1950s—among the places I know of are Greenland and Korea. He went to the middle of Mexico when I was a child to meet a half-sibling. He took me on my first domestic airline flight, and we did numerous road trips. Somehow they signed off on me going to Germany with a friend for a summer. I imagine my father wanting to give me the gift, the experience, of international travel.
Since my first passport was issued in June 1985, I’m assuming I was going to travel the following month. About a week after my passport was issued, a bomb killed three and wounded 74 at the Frankfurt Airport. Out of (possibly irrational) fear, my parents didn’t let me go on the trip. That passport went unused, and my friend did her annual trip without me.
I didn’t end up getting out of the country until I was 23, when I went to Mexico alone for a month. I must have used the same passport for visits to Vancouver and Victoria BC when I lived in Washington state (did I need it? I don’t remember). The next time I would use my passport wouldn’t be until 2004, when I went to Ecuador for three weeks for a friend’s wedding.
I got my third passport in the past few years in an effort to have my family’s passports up-to-date, ready for whatever. While fears about what’s happening in the United States partially informed the action, I have also fantasized about having both the money and the time to take my kid on trips outside of this place.
These passports hold different meanings. World travel, right now, feels very far away.
The entire time my kid was in Japan I was feeling a low-grade depression, a stream of anxiety humming and hidden in the background of everything I was doing. My partner and I went to the desert—a place we love, and a place our kid has told us she’s not as in love with as we are. In the desert for three nights, I stopped showering. My hair went flat from the lack of humidity. My bones and muscles recuperated in the outdoor hot tub that sat under a tree that seemed to balance the power lines between its branches. We ate saag paneer and samosas and chicken vindaloo for two days, and then falafel and shawarma and grape leaves for the next two days. I ate a pint of peanut-butter and chocolate ice cream over three days and I slept deeply and my lips were perpetually chapped and some small part of me kept waiting for disaster.
My kid came back, well and safe, from Japan. “It’s so easy to travel internationally!” she said, “Now I want to do it more. We should go!” She’s somewhat aware of what’s happening to the country. I’ve given her broad outlines of what we might do in worst case scenarios while trying not to worry her or upset the structure we’ve been building for her for the last fourteen years.
The privilege of being able to travel to Japan at fourteen! I’m not sure she can comprehend it yet. I’m still sitting with it, at the same time that I’m sitting with all three of our passports, collected in their shared envelope, thinking about their changing meanings, wondering if and how I will want or need to use these documents again.
Thanks for reading.
I’ll be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this year. Come to the memoir panel I’m on, Saturday, April 26th at 3pm in Taper Hall 201 at USC. I’ll also be at the Skylight Books booth signing copies of my books at 4:30pm.
Another Los Angeles date will be announced next week.
If you’re in Chicago, I’ll be in conversation with MEGAN STIELSTRA (my heart!) on Thursday, May 8th, 7pm-8:30pm.
Take good care of each other, everyone.