Why Do the Wrong People …

Musings On Getting a New Passport

Fifty years of passport photos.

I’ve just had my passport renewed, so I’m good to go for another 10 years – provided the joints and other parts hold up, and the mind stays with me. This is the sixth passport I’ve had, and I’m hoping for at least one more. Though at my age you never know, so I’m not making the appointment to have that no-doubt awful next photo taken just yet. Remarkable how the photos all turn out awful, though that first one, from 1973, looks almost like a glamour headshot beside the others – and the hair and glasses combination is definitely something of a fashion statement from the time.

Over the 50 years since that first one, I’ve been lucky enough to actually use my passports quite a bit. I even did a Substack post a while ago about the very first use, “The First Time I Saw Paris,”  based on letters I wrote my friend Claudia, which came back to me after her death.

I’ve always had a sort of mild case of wanderlust, and some years I’ve been able to manage two or three passport trips a year. Not that I’ve been a world traveler in any major way, but I’ve “been around” some, as they say. And I hope to both be around and get around some more, to get full value out of this new one.

Since its arrival earlier this month, I’ve been thinking about where I hope to use it, as well as thinking back about where I used the others. And also thinking about my people who came before, and their travels – or, more to the point, the absence of them.

My mother, born in West Texas barely a hundred years ago, never went east of the Mississippi River, that I know of, and only made it as far “north” as St. Louis, when my parents delivered me to college in 1966. She was never on an airplane! So no passport needed for her.

Thanks to the US Army, and Hitler, my father did make it to North Africa in about 1943, a trip that had enduring impacts for him, though he never talked about it. But there were nightmares - and he died 40 years later from the long-delayed result of a bullet wound he got there. He did make it from Maine, where he was born, to Texas, where he met and married my mother and stayed – thanks again, US Army – and for business and family reasons he made a few trips to New York City and back to Maine, but never again overseas. So no passport for him either.

Otherwise, I find no record of any of my people venturing outside the country until way back in the 17^th century. Though, no, that’s not quite true: some of them made it to Texas in 1835, when technically Texas was a foreign country. (Not to get political, but sadly it sometimes seems as though it still is.)

And from time to time, some of them made the one-way trip from England to America – but that’s not really what you’d call “travel.” One, a Loyalist at a time when that wasn’t a good life stance, even made the trip the other way, in 1776, leaving wife and children behind, perhaps not expecting to be gone long. Though as it happened, the trip lasted the rest of his life!

 As far as real “travel” goes – travel of the foreign sort – the only traveler I can find in my past was that 17^th-century guy, John Winthrop “the younger,” who ventured all the way to Venice and Constantinople, in 1628/29, before following “JW the elder” across the Atlantic to Massachusetts, where he’d made a somewhat consequential move in 1630.  After “the younger” voyaged this direction, in 1631, his days of foreign travel were over, aside from a return or two to England, but then technically England wasn’t a foreign country either.

There may have been one or two others who got to Holland or France for military reasons, and to Scotland and Wales in the days before the Kingdom became United, but those records are dusty.

I haven’t been to North Africa, but otherwise as far as I can tell I’ve been to all the countries that all my ancestors visited going as far back as anybody can know for sure – maybe all the way back to those who came out of wherever they came out of to get to recorded history. And not only all the places all of them had been, but many, many more! And that in one lifetime. Not even a lifetime yet, since I’m still going.

This strikes me as significant, though I’m still cogitating on what the significance is. It certainly is a major difference between my life and all those that came before (except maybe for “the younger”). And, of course, I’m not alone, or even at the forefront, in this. With the relative affluence of the last 50 years for the lucky among us, and relatively fast and inexpensive transportation, millions who are not rich have traveled more than almost all who came before.

The conventional wisdom is that travel – especially foreign travel – broadens our view, opens our eyes to the fact that people live their lives in different ways, and maybe makes us more tolerant of those differences, or at least more willing to reevaluate how we live our own lives, and consider whether or not we might want to live them differently.  That’s the conventional wisdom. But considering the state of the country and the world now, could it be that’s not true? That travel, especially now, is really mostly uncomfortable air plane seats and overcrowded must-see sights?

Is it possible – just possible – that my ancestors had it right after all, and that Noel Coward was onto something when he crooned –

Why do the wrong people travel, travel, travel

When the right people stay back home?

What peculiar obsessions inspire those processions

Of families from Houston Tex

With all those cameras around their necks?

I’d forgotten, if I ever knew, that Coward directed his sharp tongue specifically at those of us from Houston! Now that I’ve listened to his musings at the link above (or maybe even more, heard Elaine Stritch’s version), I’m having second thoughts. Maybe what I really should do is go back to that family tradition, pitch that new passport, and just “stay back home!”