Passport

This morning I find myself at the Panera by the airport waiting to renew my passport. The post office here is first come, first serve rather than requiring an appointment so I got here at 8 to be first on the list. Now I'm killing time until 9 when they'll take my pic, my forms and my money so I can renew my passport. I got the last one in 1998 when I went to Honduras with a Liberation Theology class at Presbyterian. It seems like a lifetime ago, but I haven't needed it since. Cara has been invited to give a seminar in Oslo in September though, so I'm going to tag along.

This is sort of a fulfillment of a prediction I made nearly a decade ago. At the time Cara was working at Parkwest Hospital in Knoxville registering patients. She'd dropped out of high school and then college to prioritize our kids. I was four-degreed and had recently finished a stint at SLAC in California. Needless to say, Cara did not see herself at the time as someone who would have an incredible career in science. She talked about getting certified as a medical coder to make a little more money. I told her to set her sights higher. The registration area was in the bottom of the hospital. I told her she'd find herself working upstairs one day, probably doing research. I told her that "one day she'd be invited to Scandinavia and I'd just be her husband tagging along". I was, of course, alluding to that highest honor in the sciences, the Nobel Prize, but that was how I worded it. At the time Cara just laughed at me.