I wasn’t sure how hard it would be to get a passport, whether we needed one to take Madeline to the Bahamas, or what we needed to take Madeline to the Bahamas. Plus it was a Monday and I go stir crazy watching Madeline if I don’t create chores that involve wandering about the earth. The original chore that I had planned for the day was to finish entering tax information in Bedford but it proved elusive and less fun than the procurement of the passport. So I meandered over to City Hall at about 9AM with my baby in hand and asked them what I needed to do. Among the odd things about having a baby is that you get a social security number for them before you get the birth certificate. The birth certificate sits on file at city hall waiting for you to purchase it. It is like those rides where they take a photo of you going through the plume or at the most terrifying point on a roller coaster when the hulking muscular dude next to you is screaming like a schoolgirl and vomiting into the air. Then you have to walk past and purchase some form of proof that you actually went through it to show your friends for $20. Well in this case the ride is childbirth and while the pictures would have been superb and I would have paid a few hundred bucks to see them but all they sell you is a copy of the proof of birth. The proof of birth is apparently all that is required to cross the border into the Bahamas with a child today but given the complexities predicted based on immigration reform, increased border security, and protectionism it will become harder to smuggle small babies into tropical countries and back without proper US paperwork in 2007. The people at the city hall office were gushing and happy to say hi to Madeline and especially enjoyed squeezing her big Michelin man arms.

So I decided to go through the process of obtaining a passport. They handed me some paperwork and sent me packing to get some passport photos of the little one and I meandered on my way to the next phase. I took Madeline to Walgreens to get her passport photos taken. The woman behind the counter was busy printing some giant stack of pictures so she warned me that it would be a while before she could photograph us. So I spent 15 minutes trying to manufacture purpose in Walgreens and that resulted in my purchasing a bag of sugar, a can of shaving cream, and a ten pack of sensor razor blades plus reading the latest gossip about the many babies about to be born in Hollywood. The photographer at first had me holding Madeline at an odd angle that nearly made me throw out my back but she then decided she needed a cart to rest the baby on to take a proper picture. This created a scuffle between her and the woman on the other side of the store using the cart for something like stocking razor blades and shaving cream. But Madeline sat teetering atop a black piece of cardboard on top of a cart for the required two minutes to take two beautiful pictures for her passport photo.

After a brief pit stop eating a bagel with Jeremy and Ari including watching Ari walk around a tree five times (although I think he really went around twenty times) a full bottle of milk and a god awful diaper change I was ready to return to City Hall. Once there I filled out the form thinking I was all set. I had to wait to get it processed after waiting behind a small pair of Asian women and an entourage of people working to help them to renew the license for their nail salon. The women gawked once again at how cute Madeline was and we had a good time for the twenty minutes that I was waiting. But when I handed them the forms they let me know that I couldn’t be the only person signing on the passport. Sarah was also needed at the same time. Now getting Sarah and me in the same place at the same time from 9 – 5 is not a trivial operation. So for whatever fear that the US Government had that I was going to procure a passport and steal Madeline off to the Tablisi to sell her on the black market was going to require some co-ordination with Sarah. So I called Sarah and we agreed that we could reconvene upon City Hall at 4:30 with a full 30 minutes left to get the paperwork signed and to do the oath.

So at 4:40 we walked into the office once more and the women started to look at Madeline again. But the main woman who processes everything, especially passports, looked very cross. She mentioned in a mildly passive aggressive way to the other woman working behind the desk that someone had forgotten to tell me that they don’t process any new passports after 4:00 PM. They especially don’t like to do so when there is an Asian woman and her daughter getting a rush passport set for a family of 12 to travel to Kamchatka without the right paperwork that she had been helping to pull together the forms for since I left at noon with Madeline. But she was willing to help us out, although disgruntled about having to stay past 5PM to get us serviced. But at 5:10 PM Madeline Eve Housman’s first passport application was officially paid for and is now en route to some government way station where it will be processed about three weeks after the government cashes our tax payments.