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Ticket to ride

Even if life keeps us tethered to home, a current passport promises adventure to come.

I was going through some files when I came across my passport. I opened it nostalgically - the multicolored stamps and fussy official signatures always give me a tiny mnemonic thrill, which offsets the depressing thought that, much as I hated that picture when it was taken, I'll never look that young again - and was startled to notice that it's about to expire. "Whoops!" I thought. "Better take care of this right away!" Then came another thought: "Why?"

It was a funny little moment, one of those times when you stumble over a proof of how much your life has changed while you weren't looking. I looked more closely at the woman in the picture and thought back on what it was like to be her.

She was, let's see, 31, unhappily married but not quite ready to admit it yet, and about to go on an exotic vacation with her husband that would bring all that much more sharply into focus. Oh, but it was a wonderful vacation, too - a first trip to Kenya, nearly three weeks of clear air and green hills and unforgettable, magnificent animals. Everyone calls them magnificent, I guess, and it feels like hyperbole until you see them for yourself. Their grace and freedom and pure aliveness just make you catch your breath.

My second trip to Kenya is in there, too: four years later, with a buddy this time, after I was done mourning the divorce and ready to have a blast. We did, too - she'd been the one who'd talked me into the first trip, so we could laugh at shared memories of the low points, relive the high points, and create rich new memories of this adventure.

And here on another page is the next adventure, later that same year. (Geez, where did I get the money? Not to mention the energy.) Australia this time, with the same pal, and the same revivifying mix of high spirits and beautiful land. That visa required a photograph, so I conveniently have a halfway marker between the earlier one and today: hair shorter and more intentional than before, earrings bolder, something a little sadder-but-wiser around the eyes.

I hated that one when it was taken, too. But I look at it now and, for a minute, feel a deep envy of that former self. She was so independent, so adventurous, so free.

So lonely, too, I remind myself. And it's true. But the good parts are true, too. And while I'm always impelled to make myself believe that life is getting better all the time, that I'm happier and wiser than I was - Doesn't everyone do that? I mean, how else do you go on? - today I feel like acknowledging that, yes, there are things about that vanished life, and that apparently vanished self, that I miss.

That's why, even though I have no immediate plans to use it, I will make sure to renew my passport before it expires. For what I want to hold on to from that past self is a sense of possibility. I mean, even then I didn't have the money or the time to travel endlessly; I couldn't really just pick up and go without spending precious vacation days and limited funds. But the point was, I felt as if I could. I felt free; if an adventure presented itself, I was ready to take it on. I had my passport.

In a way, it's that attitude that got me where I am now. The last stamp in this passport is from a trip to Ireland, and looking at it makes me smile in a different way from the others. The morning I got that stamp at Shannon, my head was filled with thoughts about the conversation I'd had two nights before - an all-night exploration of dreams and ideas with someone I hadn't known long but wanted to know better. The day after I got the return stamp at Logan, I called him up to continue the conversation, and we haven't stopped talking since. But that was the end of my free-spirited traveling days; our son is almost 3.

Come to think of it, neither one of them has ever been to Africa. I guess they'll be needing passports, too.