Note: You might like to read
part 1 and
part 2 of this saga. Or, you can get all three parts on one long page
here.
Just over four hours remained for Sophie and I to procure Pennsylvania’s drivers licenses with which to complete our applications for visas to India, and I’d again been foiled by my own personal Officer Dibble, the Bottom of the Page. It chortled in my face as I sat in the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation waiting room and through a mouthful of Brazil nuts explained that to get licenses Sophie and would I need a second, and completely unobtainable, proof of address. Then it toddled off to the conservatory, humming the overture to The Yeoman of the Guard. Moments later, Sophie gently took the application form from my quivering hand to see what had led to my sudden urination on the portrait of Governor Rendell. She looked it over and with a whistling whoosh deflated and flew in loops across the room, eventually snagging on the bus schedule rack.
In truth, my anger at this new development wasn’t because our situation was hopeless. In fact, I’d known for several days that we had a perfectly viable alternative for getting our licenses–one that was legal, required no complex machinations, and could probably be finished in under an hour. But it was an option so utterly distasteful to me that I’d sworn to under no circumstances, with the possible exception of having my head locked in the jaws of an alligator who demanded I buy him a pack of Camels and a bottle of Yellowtail, ever resort to it.
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Come back with me, dear readers, to a simpler time. A time eight months ago, when Steve Martin had not yet heard of Twitter, when movies about talking owls were just a magical fantasy, and when I had yet to finish living the story about which I would begin writing a month later and then forgot about until today. I resume our tale where I left off, with less than 24 hours remaining for my wife Sophie and I to acquire two forms of proof of address to use to acquire drivers licenses to use to acquire visas to use to gain entrance to India. We have just discovered, to our horror, that the Indian government has capriciously added a requirement that we include copies of our birth certificates with our visa applications. More precisely, I have just discovered that. Sophie would discover it a few minutes later when awoken by the sound of my loudly inventing ethnic slurs.
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You might remember that Sophie and I returned to the US not only because we were exhausted and had gone just far enough past the edge of sanity that we had named our luggage, cameras, and hairbrush, but also because we needed to facilitate getting visas to India. Just before arriving in Turkey, we discovered that our original plan to apply for visas at the Indian consulate in Istanbul would’ve led to us being denied and redirected to the embassy in Ankara. Which in turn would’ve led us to spend a week in a town the tourist highlight of which is something called the Monument to a Secure and Confident Future. So we opted to go home and get them the good ol’ ‘MERican way.
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