Passports
There is just something about a stamp in a passport. It gives me that giddy feeling like ticking off the last item of my to-do list. It’s that sense of completion and a physical proof that you indeed did it. The most confusing thing about George W. Bush was that he boasted the fact that he never owned a passport until he became president, like that was a badge of patriotism. What was that? 
This passport photo of Kai was taken just 1 month after his birth. The Boulder passport/post office and I had a difference of opinion on how to take a newborn’s passport photo. Kai had horrible reflux and was thus extremely uncomfortable lying flat for the photo. This is the result and it was fine for his first five years of travel.
I just love toting a passport. I look forward to knowing by heart my current passport number – as I did in my twenties – when filling in the landing forms. It feels like I belong to a world not a country, like I’m entering this flow of people that are curious about the larger planet. My first passport took me to Europe with my dad in the summer after seventh grade. Before the creation of the EU, the trains would stop for each country’s border for the passport inspections and stamps. They didn’t automatically give you a stamp in the 80’s, but if you asked, they seemed delighted to whip out their swanky stamps.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer we were issued a diplomatic passport that would gain us entry into the “fancy line” at the airport customs. But it also meant that we were not allowed into the countries which didn’t want diplomatic relations. In those days, that meant Cambodia, Burma and the Tibetan regions of China. Being that limited was not worth the fancy line.
Last summer my cousins and I stumbled upon the passport of our great grandfather from 1889. Without the technology of a picture, his features were described in words. “Face: Long, Nose: Roman, Forehead: high, mouth: small.” We thought it made him sound a bit like a horse. 
This folded poster of a passport is roughly 2 feet by 4 feet. My great-grandmother traveled with him but we couldn’t find her passport. Maybe hers was sensibly discarded when the more modern passport was born or maybe, as I’ve heard rumors, women traveling with a husband didn’t need / weren’t issued their own passport. Anyone know?
