Let's go back

It's Sunday morning. Normally, I write for a little while on Sunday morning, but I haven't left myself much time. When we return from a trip, the unpacking and laundry will often provoke a too-much-stuff-driven anxiety attack, and last night was no exception. Because we really do have too much stuff. So this morning, I cleaned rather than wrote.

I clean all the time, but routine everyday cleaning is different from turn-this-mother-out CLEANING. I'm organizing closets. I'm cleaning under things, and behind things, and on top of things. I'm purging.

But that's enough of that. What is this, HGTV?

*****
Memory is tricky, isn't it? You can be quite sure that something happened in a certain way, at a certain time. You might even be sure that you remember exactly what you were wearing, or what song was playing on the radio. And you can be wrong, even in your certainty that you remember every detail.

We went to Canada in 2010. We got passports for our children, who were 9 and 5 at the time, and renewed our own passports. I remember sitting at the Aspen Hill Post Office, waiting for our names to be called; and I remember completing the paperwork, and receiving all of our passports a few weeks later. My husband remembers the same appointment. And we did all go together, and we did sit and wait to hear our name called, and we did get our children's first passports.

Last Saturday night, we returned to the U.S. from Canada, via the same border crossing at Champlain--St. Bernard de Lacolle from which we'd entered Canada the previous Saturday. The very friendly U.S. Border Patrol agent chatted with us for a few minutes, asked us a few pro forma questions about why we'd been in Canada, and what we had purchased, and where else in the country we'd traveled. We answered, and then handed over our passports.

The border guard looked at our passports, and then looked closely at my husband. "Did you know that your passport is expired?" he asked.

"What?" we both exclaimed in unison. "No, that can't be," my husband said. "I renewed it in 2010, so it expires in 2020."

"No," said the border guard, "your wife's expires in 2020, but yours expired in June of this year. Didn't the Canadian border guards check it when you came into Canada?"

We looked at the passport, and realized that the man was 100% right. In 2008, my husband made his first return trip to Korea, the land of his birth (any excuse to write "the land of his birth"). He had renewed his passport earlier that year, and was only along for the ride when the boys and I got our passports in 2010. We had completely forgotten that small, but critical detail. Je ne me souviens pas. 

And the Canadian border guard? He had one job, as the hashtag goes. #RocketScience.

*****

Let's go back let's go back 
Let's go way on way back when
I didn't even know you, you couldn't have been too much more than ten
I ain't no psychiatrist, ain't no doctor with degrees
But it don't take too much high IQs to see what you're doing to me

I never used to cry at celebrity deaths, but as I've gotten older, I've come to understand the relationship between ordinary people and their favorite celebrities. They speak for us, or express something for us that we can't. And we don't have to know them personally, or to even meet them for a moment, to feel love and kinship with them, and gratitude for the gifts that they share. That's how I felt about Mary Tyler Moore, and Carrie Fisher, and Kate Spade. And Aretha Franklin. "Think," one of Aretha's own songs, was the one that I couldn't get out of my head today. You have to watch her perform that song, not just listen to it, because she used her whole body when she sang, with a combination of freedom and abandon, but total control, that was unique to her. I kept singing "Think" to myself, but I didn't cry until I saw a later performance of "(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman," a song written by Carole King but owned by Aretha.

We can listen to Aretha forever; but it won't be the same, knowing that she's gone and that there won't be any new Aretha performances.

People walking around everyday
Playing games, taking score
Trying to make other people lose their minds
Ah, be careful you don't lose yours

I'll be careful I don't lose mine. Aretha Franklin, rest in peace.