the time with the passport « Letters from Grenada

the time with the passport

He’d had a passport but it got wet – ruined – in the hurricane. The day of the storm he’d gotten home and found the contents of his house afloat and the dog perched atop the refrigerator. Bean’s father – though he was not yet Bean’s father, had not yet even laid eyes on Bean’s mother – he opened the door and the water rushed out, soaking his feet. He gathered some clothes and his TV and DVD player. The electronics he laid out in the sun to dry. He didn’t expect them to work but they did. The clothes too, of course, were fine once he’d rinsed and hung them. Everything else was lost, destroyed by the wind and rain or simply washed away. He abandoned the house, leaving behind a mattress and his family photos. All were waterlogged beyond recognition.

He’d never gotten the passport replaced. It intimidated him, the prospect of going to town, speaking to officials, filling out forms. He was much more comfortable climbing a mast, swinging his cutlass, driving that forklift, holding an iguana. Besides, he wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t leaving the island. Why would he? Everything he needed was right there.

It was almost two years later, in the summer, that a friend of mine was getting married. One of my best friends – I was to be a bridesmaid – and so I wanted him to come with me to the States, meet my family. By then he was the father of my child.

He needed a copy of his birth certificate in order to get a new passport, and that too had been lost, so we went to the Registrar’s Office in Saint George’s. The building sat on the crest of a steep hill, and as we walked up it I felt the muscles in the backs of my thighs pleasantly pull. Pleasantly because by then I was accustomed to such exertion and noticed but no longer minded the tropical sun that poured itself over my head on its way to the steaming asphalt beneath my feet. The asphalt was black and they say that black absorbs heat, which it does, I guess, but it also has an energy saturation point, and once that point is reached the heat bounces off the asphalt and hits me behind the knees and under the chin, and I’m reminded of those foiled, reflective triptychs of cardboard that American women, desperate to be bronze at any cost, hold beneath their faces, amplifying the light of the North American Spring.

There had been a lot of back and forth, from one office to another, this place to buy the necessary tax stamps, another to fill out the proper form and a third where the records are actually kept. It’s in that third place that we wait, on metal folding chairs in a small office, while the registrar herself retreats to look up his original birth paper. While she’s gone I imagine it’s like the Library of Congress, where you fill out a slip and they bring you your book. Or perhaps more like wherever Dickens’ Marley stored his completed ledgers, shelved and dusty; cramped and in chronological order.

She’s gone for close to 20 minutes, which feels too long, and when she comes back she’s empty-handed. She asks us to confirm the year. 1967, I tell her. She smiles. She disappears.

When she returns for the second time she holds a slip of paper in her hand, and I breathe, relieved. I watch her as she writes out our copy. She uses a real fountain pen and her penmanship is flowery, filled with old-fashioned curlicues and other details I haven’t seen since Paris.

She fills in the year, affixes the stamps and hands it to us. 1966.

He’s a year older than he realized. There must be a mistake, he says. No, she assures us. She’s quite sure. 1966.

We make our way back down the hill, towards the oceanfront bus terminal. I’m smiling, more than a little amused. He asks me what the joke is and I tell him: Sweetie, you missed your fortieth birthday.

On our way home we buy a jug of red wine, because, as I explain and he is easily convinced, we simply must not miss the opportunity to fete this occasion.