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Managing Editor Scott Wright has been with The Post
since 1998. He is Looking back on passport No. 1 By Scott Wright I renewed my passport last month and finally got the new one in the mail late last week. My old one had expired in February and in case you don't know this about passports, they're good for 10 years at a time. Work backwards from my current age and that tells you I was 28 when I had my last passport photo taken in 1998.Wow. It really didn't seem that long ago until I wrote it down just now. This time around -- and with the title of John Connelly's country classic “Backside of Thirty” beginning to make perfect sense to me -- the guy in the photo on my passport has a little less hair on top and a little more fat on the sides. (Perhaps, if you'd been able to visit my house and inspect firsthand the Scott-shaped impression in the TV-facing cushions of my living room couch, you'd have been able to predict the part about the weight gain.) Despite my diminished appearance, I was actually excited last week when my new passport arrived. I'll be taking a trip to a tiny, hand grenade-infested Caribbean beach resort this summer with a few poker buddies and their wives, and I can't wait to see if the duct tape on the wings of the Third World airline we've chosen for the trip actually remains attached to the fuselage for the duration of the flight. And if you're going to embark on a suicide mission of such magnitude these days, you must first pay the federal government $75 for the paperwork that gives you permission to toss logic and common sense into the wind -- in this case, quite literally. God bless America. Anyway, enough of the perils passport No. 2 may soon bring. Let's talk some more about my first passport. Shortly after securing the booklet in '98, I traveled to Europe with my friend Burgess Lane and a group of high school students from Sand Rock and Centre. Gary and Kay Davis put the trip together and the 27 of us had a blast. We spent 10 days crawling through the catacombs beneath Rome, Italy, ascending the Eiffel Tower in Paris and knocking back a pint or two in the pubs of Merry Old England. We stood in the noon shadow of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, gawked at the 300-foot-high ceilings inside St. Peter's Cathedral, counted cats in the Roman Coliseum, and tackled (unsuccessfully) a totally raw sausage sandwich in Florence, Italy. Long story. Trust me, it was gross. I still see Emily Morgan about twice a year and every time, without fail, as soon as our eyes meet and without one word being spoken, we both break into hysterical laughter. We're remembering, of course, the night she stuck her head out the window of the train we were taking to Paris and almost decapitated herself. And I don't just mean laughing to the point where you're crying and punching yourself in the face because you've been doubled over gasping for air for so long that you're in danger of losing consciousness. I mean really laughing. The entire adventure was great fun. And then, two years later, I got to do it all over again. In 2000, it was once again Gary and Kay Davis who did all the legwork in advance of our trip. They took along a few students, some parents and grandparents, a doctor, a pharmacist and lots of other respectable folks -- and me. In nine days, we completely covered the top half of the jackboot of Italy. We lunched on sandwiches in Bologna on day one and spent days two and three dodging raindrops as we floated down the canals of Venice. No one fell out of his gondola, but even if he had he'd have been drier than the rest of us were after days four and five in Florence. On days six and seven, the sun finally joined us for a walk down the ancient streets of Pompeii and up the narrow walkways of the Isle of Capri. Days eight and nine we spent in magnificent Rome, gazing through the hole in the top of the Pantheon, tossing coins into Trevi Fountain and elbowing our way through throngs of pilgrims in Vatican City. If anything I ever did in my life was better than my first trip to Europe, it was my second trip to Europe. Sure, we spent a lot of time crammed onto a bus. So what? And yeah, the flight home was 11 hours and I got home at 3 a.m. and had to be at work by nine. But who cares? If I had $3,500 and didn't think Kristin and Tina would have the whole place burned down by the time I completed my mandatory pre-flight rum and Coke ritual, I'd take the same trip again tomorrow. And one of these days, before passport no. 2 expires, I'm damned-well going to make it back, too, even if I have to take a sledgehammer to the newly-bricked wall where the Regions night drop box used to be and then whittle my way into the vault with my granddad's rusted pocketknife and "borrow" a few thousand dollars of your money to pay for it. Seriously, I got my money's worth from that first passport and I'm looking forward to seeing where my new one will take me between now and the day it expires in March 2018. Sounds like plenty of time, huh? Check back in then and if I'm still here hammering away at this keyboard we'll see how many paragraphs it takes me to summarize all the stamps I'll have been able to accumulate with passport No. 2. As long as that duct tape doesn't fail me, come June. |