Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(54)

The nuisance of visas and having them renewed was something I left to Hugh, who’s a whiz at that sort of thing. There was nothing the authorities demanded that he couldn’t locate: our original birth certificates, a hank of his grandmother’s hair, the shoes I wore when I was twelve. People think it’s easy to leave home and resettle in another country, but in fact it’s exhausting, and purposefully so. The government’s hope is to weed out the lazy, though all it really eliminates are those who can’t afford an immigration lawyer. Had we not been native English speakers, and had Hugh not loved the challenges, we’d have hired one as well. As it was, we renewed our visas the requisite three times and then applied for Indefinite Leave. Aside from the mountain of paperwork, this involved reading a manual called Life in the UK and taking a subsequent test.

Hugh sat for it on the same day I did, and we spent weeks in the summer of 2008 studying. During that time I learned the difference between the House of Lords and the House of Commons. I learned that in 1857 British women won the right to divorce their husbands. I learned that people below the age of sixteen cannot deliver milk in the U.K., but I don’t think I learned why. It was just one of those weird English injustices, like summer.

Before taking the real test, I took the fake ones provided at the back of the study manual. “What do people eat on Christmas?” was one of the questions. Another was “What do you do on Halloween when someone comes to the door?” It was multiple-choice, and possible answers included “call the police” and “run and hide.”

I laughed, but these weren’t jokes. If you were from Chad, you’d likely freak out when children with panty hose over their heads showed up at your house demanding that you give them candy. As for the Christmas-meal question, do I know what they eat in Nigeria for Eid-el-Kabir or in Beijing for Qingming?

Another of the test questions asked why great numbers of Jewish people immigrated to the U.K. in the early part of the twentieth century. I don’t recall all the possible answers, but A was “to escape racist attacks” and C was “to invade and seize land.”





Hugh and I took our tests along with a dozen other foreigners, and though they didn’t give us our grades, I’m pretty sure I had a perfect score. He missed a question about the cost of eye exams for people over sixty but otherwise got everything right. Our Indefinite Leave stickers were nothing much to look at—just our pictures surrounded by stamps and seals—but still we gazed at them for hours on end, the way you might at a picture of the baby you birthed upside down in a burning house after a difficult seven-year pregnancy. While juggling knives.

The next step is to get our British passports, though it’s not necessary. As it is, Hugh and I can live and work in the U.K. for the rest of our lives.





I had my Indefinite Leave for four years before my passport was stolen. The theft took place on Oahu. Telling people this erases the sympathy I get for being burglarized, so I’m always inclined to leave it out. Then too, there seems nothing specifically Hawaiian about it. There are only two places to get robbed: TV and the real world. On television you get your stuff back. In the real world, if you’re lucky, the policeman who responds to your call will wonder what kind of computer it was. Don’t let this get your hopes up. Chances are he’s asking only because he has a software question. The officer who responded to our call was prompt but not terribly reassuring. “Yeah”—she sighed, looking at the spot where my stolen property used to be—“we get a lot of burgs in this area.”

That’s how lazy she was—couldn’t even squeeze out the extra two syllables.

There was an oceanfront park a quarter of a mile up the road from our rental house, so after the police left I walked over with Gretchen, convinced that in one of the trash cans I would discover my computer bag. The laptop would be gone, I figured, but surely I would find my passport. It’s crazy how certain I was. Gretchen and I looked in one trash can after another, and just as I started searching the bushes, I realized how big the world is. You’d think I might have noticed this before, perhaps while on a twenty-three-hour flight from London to Sydney, but the size of a planet doesn’t really strike you until you start looking for something. It could have been anywhere, my old passport, but in my mind’s eye I saw it on a scratched-up, glass-topped coffee table, the surface of which was dusted with meth.

I suppose the people who steal from us could be decent and well intentioned. The things they take while we’re out working—our watches and cameras, the wedding rings passed down by our great-grandmothers—they’re all going to feed a sick child or to buy a new hip for a colorful and deserving old person. That, though, would make things too complicated. Much simpler to do like I did, and decide that these people are scum. Your stuff was sold off for a bag of dope, and while you lie awake, turning it over in your mind, your thief is getting high somewhere in front of a stolen TV. Remorse? His only regrets are that you weren’t away from home longer and that you didn’t have better things.

I have it on good authority that in the days before DNA testing, a great many burglars used to shit on their victims’ beds or carpets—this as an added insult before heading back out the window or whichever hole they’d crept in through. That they could defecate on command like that, and solely for spite, further illustrated their depravity in my book.