05-JUL-B-2
PREPARATIONS
FOR THE TAKEOFF AND CONCLUDING DETAILS IN DERWOOD AND DC PRE-DEPARTURE
MELANCHOLY
CONTACT AT DEPARTURE
WHICH LEAVES
ME FORLORN AT THE OUTSET
OF TWO
INTERNATIONAL ADVENTURES
July 18--22, 2005
THE PASSPORT/VISA LAST MINUTE SHUFFLE
In a cliff-hanging scramble that
was not optimum for harmonious takeoff, I have driven back and forth four times
from Montgomery County
to DC today and now have in hand a brand new US passport. Not only does it have a fresh new start on
its (only) 24 pages—good until July 20, 2015—which I would fill at my current
rate within the next year—but it also has a fresh pageful of an Eritrean visa
stamp. It was because of an inordinate
delay on the part of our own US passport office (stating that the new law that
states that anyone crossing the border, as many once did into Canada or Mexico
would do so on their driver’s license alone) would need a passport—so that
doubled their workload and tripled the delays.
But with a triple surcharge, it could be expedited, so much of yesterday
I spent tracking it by Fed Ex tracking number until I could choreograph it into
the plan today to shuttle between offices to get the final approval of one of
the two destinations to which I am going.
I will have to go to the Baku International Airport
in Azerbaijan
to get a visa there despite my appearance in the consular office here this
afternoon when they announce it would take until Wednesday to stamp the visa in
it. This is in distinct contrast to the
extraordinary help the Eritreans were to me.
My own passport has been
the subject of quite a lot of flurry this week.
It was "found" on a desk in Pittsburgh five weeks after I sent
it out for renewal the day after the senior Croskerys had their June 3rd
Derwood visit. The Passport Office said
they had just received it, but I have the bank statements that the check was
cashed in mid-June. They explained that
this year by mid-June that single office in Pittsburgh had processed over eleven million
passports--more than all of 2004 together, so mine was an example of an
overwhelming load hitting an understaffed office. But, hearing that the rest of the mission was
dependant upon accompanying my license, they "expedited" it for a triple
surcharge, and following it by FED EX tracking numbers, I have just picked it
up and carried it to the Eritrean Embassy where they stayed open after hours to
stamp the visa in it for me with many expressions of appreciation for the
mission. It was heart-warming to see a
personal approach after the foibles of bureaucracy--and it was not our own
government that was the shining exemplar.
A SURPRISING CONTACT
AMID THE BUSTLE OF DEPARTURE
WHICH BEGAN POIGNANT,
AND ENDS CRUELLY
IN DISMISSING ALL MY
HOPES AS “CURED ILLUSIONS”
I also had a startling
and tender email first thing this morning to which I had responded as a
pre-departure farewell to Virginia. My response was followed by a bristling
rebuttal, saying she was completely “whole” now and quite healthy—and in
love—with some one else, the same one as she had stated regretfully that it was
over when she had last written on takeoff for Italy. But, she was quite definitive about our
future, whatever nostalgia we may have had for our past, which she now states
was an “illusion.” There was a
remarkable contrast between the note she wrote early this morning and the later
dismissive comments she had made as she was preparing for a big weekend of
other activities, pointing out to me that she may be planning to visit her
parents in Cincinnati a week before the Halsted meeting we had originally
planned there, and she would like to see me if I might just “stop in” briefly.
So, another set of the last residual plans may be dissolving as I pack up now
for the two long trips that may carry me away from the Derwood all perfectly
mowed and manicured and outfitted with new furniture—just in time for my abandoning
it for a month.
I was contemplating these turns of
events in the abrupt absence of anyone to talk to and with almost all the
last-minute rush of details either finished or waived. I was abruptly alone. I went for one of the last runs on the test
Reeboks for their return (they are being sent back along with over fifty miles
per week on these ultra light running shoes!) and thought of the coming
races—two ten milers, first in Annapolis and second the Army Ten Miler in
DC. I will then make my trip to San Antonio in October carefully timed to leave after the
ELDP weekend, then go on to Denver
for the elk hunt for which license applications have been submitted. For all the many ELDP papers that are due in
my coming absence, I had rushed to get them completed and submitted in advance,
and I believe I have most of those bases covered. I had heard from Virginia
and her mother that she had to go to Iowa
City and go through still more hoops, but is finally
approved as the “Doctor of Musical Arts” that she had celebrated in her May
graduation. I am just now getting well
into the dissertation process which I see form my predecessors will be upended
often in the process, but I am on track to complete the course work by this
spring when we sit in groups for the “Comps.”
But, all this “busyness” had been
in a rush of trivia as I went through hoops of my own, and now, just before
leaving after perfunctory packing two bags, one each for the two trips, I
realized how alone I am. Derwood is
beautiful just now, and is being abandoned by the only resident that is here
now, quite in contrast to the happy home for which it was planned. As I thought these thoughts, a jagged series
of lightning strikes and a loud thunderstorm ripped up the night. I did not go to sleep, but wrote a letter to
accompany the birthday card I had planned to send to Virginia from London, the
site of our last happy times together, both in touring before our Malawi
/Zambia trip and then when she lost her passport, and I stayed behind to help
get a new one. I showed her around my “European Home Town”
and the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene as well as the Nuffield
of the Royal College of Surgeons where I stayed in 1990 as an LSTMH
student. And now, I am again a lonely
graduate student, working on my “terminal degree” as I have lost my traveling
companion in another more important part of my life, now vacant again.
So, now I depart for high
adventures—through the Caucasus of Azerbaijan, on a high mountain hiking hunt
in pursuit of the Caucasus Tur—while I am still able to do so. You should probably be able to see and share
a bit of this experience, since I will be accompanied by a TV cameraman named
Patrick who will be filming my hunt to add to the footage done of my brief
interviews in the Derwood Game Room.
I then go back through the troubled
European Hometown of London to Frankfurt, where I will have an overnight Ibis
Hotel to be able to host my arriving very excited students from GWU and a few
others from Howard, who may use my Ibis Hotel as a haven of rest and a shower,
before we all go on the afternoon flight to Asmara, Eritrea where I begin the
long-planned Eritrean surgical mission. Ironically, this is a mission Virginia would have
accompanied me to get help out of her medicated despondency before the Italian
opera gig supplanted it. She now reports
that she still might like to accompany me in a future mission, but she laid
down several ground rules that I had to understand, among them that I would
have to be her sponsor but could expect no personal relationship which is over,
and that I must lose all the anger at her treatment of me and disappointment,
sharing in her happiness (however short-lived) that she is at last getting
better and is going to try to get to be happy and loving—with another.
The lightning flashes again, and a
low rumble continues for several minutes as I walk out of the Game Room she had
said she would be unlikely to be seeing, and dropped her birthday card in my
bag packed for London. I went up stairs,
and looked in at the newly furnished, still unused Master Bedroom, and turned
to my small single bed in the office room, all alone and melancholy. With respect to her current statements
performed for my benefit, and with respect to my long lonely waiting game, I
will use her recurrent theme—which seems to describe for her now the happiness
we had shared, now called “illusions of a very sick and troubled woman”:
“This, too, shall pass.”