Passport Pictures

In sorting through photos for my last post, I found these passport pictures that my husband and I took the same month we were married. It was a week before our wedding, and I remember vividly standing in that long winding line with him at the passport office in Rockefeller Center in 1986. We were there for hours, but all I remember is being completely happy and entertained the whole time, one of those moments in life where there was nowhere else I wanted to be but where I was in the company of this man. That day in the line, we talked, we laughed, we leaned against each other and people watched, and I realized then what has been true since: I can have a great time wherever I am, whatever I am doing, whatever is or isn't happening around me when this man is around. The air around me feels lighter and brighter when he walks into a room. I guess it's a good thing I married him. That was 25 years ago this August.

Another thing I'm beginning to understand is that I enjoy studying my passport pictures and thinking about all the places those particular pictures have carried me. I think it comes from being born on an island. You're always looking outward to the larger world, across the sea. I'm struck by how my expression in this picture is much the same as my expression in my five-year-old passport picture in the previous post. It's part of what so captivates me about the evolution of faces. Every previous face of ours exists in the face we wear now. I find that comforting.