Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(56)
Without my passport, I was stuck in the country I had immigrated to. And all because of some drug addict in Hawaii. While he got high on the beach, I endured one of the wettest, coldest summers on record. Growing up in North Carolina, I got my fill of hot, sticky weather. Ninety-degree heat does nothing for me—I hate it. A little warmth wouldn’t have hurt, though, a couple of days when I didn’t have to wear both a sweater and a long undershirt, these beneath a hideous plastic poncho. I honestly hadn’t known it was possible to rain that much. It was so bad in West Sussex that baby birds were drowning in their nests. Even frogs were dying. Frogs! Our Italy trip was to be a reading with a few days of vacation tacked on. But instead of driving through the Piedmont with Hugh and our friend Eduardo, I walked the roads surrounding our house, wearing knee-high Wellingtons and watching as bloated slugs floated by.
Everyone but me seemed to be going places.
Once a week, in an attempt to break the monotony, Hugh and I would grab our jumbo golf umbrellas and slog down the road to the pub, where we’d catch up on the local news. One of our few neighbors who had not yet flown to Spain had her house broken into while she was upstairs asleep. The thief stole her purse and, after discovering that her car keys were in it, took her Audi as well. In response, the local police suggested that, as a precautionary measure, we all start sleeping with our keys.
Had they responded this way in France or America, it wouldn’t have surprised me, but wasn’t everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn’t every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That’s the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There’s even Edith Pargeter’s Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way. But now, almost nine hundred years later, the solution is to sleep with our keys? “How’s that for progress?” I said to Hugh as we waded home. “I mean, why not just tell us to sleep in our cars?”
In mid-October I was scheduled to fly to the U.S., and then on to thirty cities as part of a lecture tour. Canceling it was out of the question, so in early September I called the Home Office and demanded that they send my passport back. This meant canceling my application and losing the five hundred dollars that accompanied it, but what choice did I have? The person I spoke to on the phone explained that the return process could take up to twenty working days. She also said that if I left for the States, there was no guarantee the British government would let me back into the U.K.
I hung up thinking there were worse things than being deported from England. What’s with a country that takes six months to replace a sticker in somebody’s passport, this when it’s all right there on the computer? Then I thought of other things I don’t like about the place: the littering, the public drunkenness, the way they say “Jan” instead of January. There are problems everywhere, of course. It’s just that without my passport I can’t adequately appreciate them.
A few days into my tour of the U.S., someone on Oahu came upon a computer bag with a checkbook and a passport in it. He or she then took them to the nearest post office, along with a note reading, “Aloha. These were found abandoned. Very important documents. I hope they can find their way back to the owner.” There was no name at the bottom, just the word “Thanks.”
The postal supervisor used my checkbook to track down my banker, and three days later I had my old passport back. After opening it up and kissing my Indefinite Leave to Remain sticker, I called the Hawaiian postal supervisor, who told me that my things had been found in the vicinity of the house I’d rented, not far from the area I’d scoured with Gretchen. That was all he could tell me. Neither the passport nor the checkbook smelled of mildew, so maybe they were only recently tossed out. By whom? I no longer care. Instead of thinking about my burglar, I’m turning my imagination toward the unidentified person who so thoughtfully ended my nightmare with the British Home Office. I think of good instead of evil. I believe in luck again. It would have been nice to get my computer back, but I can live with its loss. My only regret is that my case was so anticlimactic. What began as a mystery ended as an even bigger one. Who are you, Good Samaritan? I wonder. What are you doing right this minute? Donating bone marrow? Reading to the blind? Teaching crippled children to dance?
On returning to England in early December, I handed two passports to my Heathrow border agent. He looked at the old one containing my Indefinite Leave sticker, and then at the new one, which he stamped and handed back. He may have said, “Welcome home,” or it might have been simply “Next.” In the way of people who have better things on their minds, I didn’t quite bother to listen.
The Happy Place
It was late September, and Hugh and I were in Amsterdam. We’d been invited out for dinner, so at five o’clock we left our hotel and took an alarming one-hundred-twenty-dollar cab ride to the home of our hostess, a children’s book author who lived beside a canal in the middle of nowhere. By the time we arrived, it was dark. Someone opened the door to greet us, and it took me a moment to realize it was Francine. Obscuring her face were two clear plastic bags filled with water. Both were suspended by strings, just sort of sagging there, like testicles. I, of course, asked about them, and she said they were for keeping the flies away. “I don’t know what it is, but they see or sense these sandwich bags and immediately head off in another direction. Isn’t that right, Pauline?” Francine said to her girlfriend. “Not one fly all summer, and usually the house is full of them.”