Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(55)

My computer was stolen at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, and that night I had a reading in Honolulu. Several stars from the crime series Hawaii Five-O came backstage before the show and were infinitely more helpful than the real police officers I’d dealt with earlier in the day. “The first thing we need to do is set up a reward,” said the actor who played Detective Lieutenant Chin Ho Kelly. I’d never spoken to anyone so handsome, and said in response, obviously dazed, “You’ll be my what?”





Hugh, Gretchen, and I stayed on Oahu for another five days, and afterward, with me using my police report as ID, we flew to Los Angeles, where I secured a new passport. The picture in my stolen one wasn’t half bad, but in the new one I look like a penis with an old person’s face drawn on it. I could have had more photos taken, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. This was the new me, post-theft—all my youthful optimism gone, filched by some drug addict in Hawaii. Every time I looked at my horrible new passport, I thought of him and wondered what he was up to. The person I pictured was in his mid-to-late twenties, with a vibrant tattoo on his neck—something classy, perhaps a scorpion waving a joint. He was like a paper doll I would accessorize with whatever I found irritating that day: He texted during movies. He ate at Chick-fil-A. He put glitter in his thank-you letters, and when you opened them the damn stuff got all over everything.

I often wondered if my thief had ever been caught. If he’d spent time in jail, who had bailed him out? His mother? His girlfriend? I figured he was straight, since a gay person, or even a bisexual, would have also taken my rubberized canvas tote, which was right next to my computer bag and which prompts compliments like you would not believe.





In early December 2011 I flew back to London. Border agents in France don’t care who comes into their country, but in England it’s a different story. “What are you doing here?” they want to know. “What are you really doing here?” Indefinite Leave put an end to these questions, but now, without it, I was back to square one, treated like a lowly visitor.

“How long will you be in the U.K.?” asked my Heathrow border agent. “Where are you staying?”

I explained my situation, and after asking me to step to the side, the man carried my passport into an office and looked me up on the computer. It confirmed my Indefinite Leave, and I was free to go. No problem. Returning from South Korea a month later, I had the exact same experience. Then I took the train to Paris, and on my return I got a female border agent who really laid into me. “Why haven’t you gotten a new Indefinite Leave sticker?”

I reminded her that the process takes a great deal of time. It involves surrendering your passport—a problem, as I’d been traveling nonstop for work.

She crossed her arms. “What do you do for a living?”

I told her I was a writer, and she said very sternly that I could write at home.

“Well, not about South Korea,” I wanted to say, but it’s pointless to argue with people like her, so I just stood there, shaking.

“I don’t even have to let you in,” she hissed. “Do you realize that?”

I cleared my throat. “Yes.”

“What did you say?”

I felt the people behind me watching, and sensed them thinking, as I often do, What’s with the troublemaker? “Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

It seemed she wouldn’t be happy until I was crying. “Yes, I realize you don’t have to let me in.”

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more foolish than I did at that moment. Who was I to feel at home in another country, to believe that filling out forms and scoring high marks on a test guaranteed me the same sense of belonging I take for granted in the United States? Had a border agent there given me trouble, I might have gotten frustrated, but I doubt that my hands would have shaken, or that my voice, after climbing another three octaves, would have quivered and broken, leaving me to sound like Snow White with Parkinson’s. “But…,” I wanted to say, “but I thought you liked me.”

“Walk this way.” The woman lifted herself, muttering, from her chair, and as she left her booth, I glanced at her belt, expecting to find scalps swinging from it. Grabbing my bag, I followed her to an office, where one of her colleagues looked me up on the computer. My passport was stamped, and after ten minutes spent sitting on a bench and thinking about my thief, I was free to go. Hugh suggested I’d simply gotten the wrong border agent, but the experience was so unsettling that after returning to London I had him complete the paperwork for a new Indefinite Leave sticker. The forms were sent, along with my passport and a sizable check, to the British Home Office, and after a week I received a letter saying that they’d gotten my envelope and should hopefully get back to me within six months.

I said to Hugh, “Six months?”

“That’s at the latest,” he told me. “For all you know, it could come next week.”





I sent off my passport at the beginning of June, and when, by mid-July, it had still not been returned, I had to cancel a reading in Italy. When it did not come by the end of July, I had to forfeit a nonrefundable Eurostar ticket to France. Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling. When I explained it to people face-to-face, I would see their eyes glazing over, and when I explained it over the phone, I could feel them turning on their computers and checking their retirement accounts.