Musings Of A Muddled Male

Importance of the Look

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

        Several years ago some friends talked us into a trip to Canada's Vancouver Island.  Ann, my wife, and I are not much for traveling, but Vancouver Island was a place of fond memories from when we had visited earlier in our marriage and we thought a trip there again might bring those fun times back into our life.  The problem was that life had moved into the post 9/11 era, and travel between the U.S. and Canada now requires a passport, or at least a passport card to get back and forth across the border.

        Our friends with whom we would be travelling already had passports because they were world travelers.  We, on the other hand were passport-less, so to speak, because the only foreign land we had visited recently was the town of Dingle by way of the Dingle Bottoms Road.  Thus began our venture into the world of State Department intrigue and high finance.  First came a multi-page form that could be found on the internet and had to be printed and filled out by hand without error because errors counted as fibs and fibs screamed TERRORIST.  The "T" word would not only keep us from getting a passport, it was also likely to place us in a supine position on a Guantanamo Bay water board.  It took me five tries for each form since I was nervous and kept making mistakes.

        Next came the passport pictures.  We tried taking them ourselves and then digitally manipulating them into Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt look-a-like's, but we only printed one set when we needed two, and we used a pastel color background when it was supposed to be white.  "So," said the young lady at the Montpelier Post Office, "take off your glasses and I will shoot real passport photographs for you.”  Ann disliked her official photo immediately because it highlighted a wrinkle she had been trying to hide.  As for me, I don't use my glasses to read, I use them to hide my nose.  In the harsh light of the Post Office close-up the lack of glasses amplified my proboscis (prominent nose, in case you wondered what a proboscis is) to king sized proportions.

        Then came the fees.  Each passport card cost forty-five dollars.  Expedited service cost another sixty dollars each.  And the obligatory official passport photo set us back fifteen dollars apiece.  Grand total for Ann and I came to two hundred and forty dollars and we hadn’t even begun our trip.  Even more painful was that Ann's wrinkle showed, and my picture proved that Ann had married a man with the profile of an elephant seal.

        The memory of this painful experience came flooding back the other day when I was trying to take a photograph of myself for use in renewing my concealed-carry card.  Filling out the forms was much easier now because I could enter the information online and make corrections by keyboard until I had everything just right.  The Photo was a little tougher, however, because the instructions clearly stated that it had to be “passport” quality and it had to be taken from a distance of six feet so that it showed me from about six inches above my head down to and including my chest.  I was at home alone because Ann had gone visiting, and so I activated my engineering skills and invented a setup by which I could take a “selfie” from a distance of 6 feet even though my arm was only two feet long.  Since Ann wasn’t there to stop me I put a step-stool on the dining table to hold my iPhone at the correct elevation with the step-stool located six feet from where I would be standing in front of a blank wall for background while trying to look like a conscientious U.S. citizen that could be trusted to pack a weapon in public.  Then I placed a pile of books on the step-stool against which I could lean my phone, set the flash to add light, and set the timer to five seconds to give me time to click the button and move back in front of the wall to look trustworthy before the flash flashed.  I admit that it took several tries before I got the correct look of trustworthiness in spite of one drooping eyelid and a proboscis only partially hidden by a pair of outsized glasses.

        To be honest it was a tiring and stressful exercise, but it worked and my renewal card arrived in the mail Friday.  Then my friend the Unmuddled Mathematician managed to out me by telling the world that while this eighty year old man was bragging about his concealed-carry card, his wife wouldn’t allow him to buy a gun to conceal.  Well, engineers have always been more creative than stick-in-the-mud mathematicians and I have worked out a compromise that will let me scare off any would-be criminal who might attempt to enter into my personal space.  While Ann won’t let me buy a gun, she will allow me to wear the card around my neck to warn off anyone attempting to take me or my wallet hostage.  And my friend the professor gave me a Tee shirt which has blazoned across the front in bold letters, “QUESTION AUTHORITY, BUT DO NOT QUESTION BOB.”  I decided that combining those two things would leave me looking invincible.  What do you think?