April 16, 2005 – Passport to my Past

April 16, 2005 – Passport to my Past

I went looking for my past in a briefcase that held a collection of past deeds: a letter from PriceWaterhouseCooper thanking me for participating as a panel moderator at the Licensing Executive Seminar in Napa in 1999, a copy of a book on hard drives I wrote in the mid-1980s for Elsevier Science Publishers, who's magazines I edited, flyers on conferences I had produced, business plans for publishing ventures that went nowhere. Stuck in a pocket of the briefcase was an expired passport with two holes punched in the front cover to identify it as such. The passport was issued September 4, 1984 and expired ten years later on September 4, 1994.

The picture staring out at me from the inside front cover was a young man I barely recognized. His hair was completely black as was the full beard hiding his face. He wore large wire frame glasses with square lenses—a German design it seems to me. He’s wearing a gray suit and tie both hiding a white shirt. He is not smiling but the face is pleasant looking though his ears are hidden and the passport photographer’s flash has created a black shadow behind and extending from the tip of his ear to the collar of his white shirt. The shadow gives the viewer the impression that he has long hair. The rectangular face has two brown eyes that give the impression of a smile.

The front page of the passport shows four stamps: two from Heathrow Airport and two from Gatwick Airport outside London. The first pair shows the passport holder, me, arriving Heathrow June 13th 1986 on British Airways 286, which departed SFO at 545PM on the 12th arriving London at 11:45 Friday the 13th. The second stamp of the pair showed me leaving Heathrow on Wednesday June 18th 1986 for a short overnight trip to Amsterdam where I spoke for a day returning to London on an evening flight after the conference on Thursday the 19th. While I was out speaking, my wife IM and our two teenage daughters ME and RD were enjoying London celebrating ME’s graduation from high school, anticipating her entering University of California Irvine in the fall.

On our arrival Friday the 13th we took a cab from Heathrow to The Rembrandt Hotel, which is located on the Brompton Road at a Y which forks to the right becoming Cromwell Road and to the left becoming Thurloe Place, the street where the Hotel is located. Built at the end of Victoria’s reign and at the beginning of Edwardian England, the hotel resembles a grand country house sitting in the middle of Knightsbridge London, within a couple of blocks of Harrods and directly across Brompton Road from the Victoria and Albert Museum. The museum had an exhibition of Cecil Beaton, the foremost fashion and portrait photographer of his day, which my daughters had to see and we did. Beaton had died at the dawn of the 1980s, after a career of shooting the great luminaries of his time from the Sitwells to the Rolling Stones.

The year had begun on a tragic note. On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated shortly after liftoff killing the first civilian ever to go into space. Christa McAuliffe, 37, married with two children, was picked from among 10,000 entries for a competition to be the first schoolteacher in space. Who could have imagined the tragedy awaiting the unsuspecting winner? I had been driving to meet someone for a writing job sometime in the morning of that Tuesday. I had the car radio on when the news broke. I went on to my appointment but we ended up talking more about the tragedy than the job at hand, something I suspect most of America was doing then.

But by June 1986 the country was out of mourning and after my speaking engagements were complete, we went looking for things to do in London. One of them was a trip to the West End. I had gone to a local ticket seller to get tickets for a West End musical and the agent talked me into four balcony seats to see a new musical called, "Chess', by Tim Rice and Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus from ABBA. ME and RD had already heard one of the songs from the play, “One Night in Bangkok,” which had given singer Murray Head a hit even before the play had been staged. It was a memorable night and we purchased the recording of the musical during intermission along with T-Shirts for everyone completely black with a minimalist graphic—the musical’s name on the front. Our lives together can be marked by the musicals we all went to see: A Chorus Line in the late 1970s when both girls were active in dance, Cats in the early 1980s during a trip to New York, when both girls were heavy into their high school after school musical and drama…

The company that had invited me to speak at their one-day conference wanted to treat us to lunch in Oxford before we left. We rented a car on the Friday the 20th and drove out for a nice leisurely lunch. Afterwards, we wandered about Oxford until evening when we drove back to London to get ready for the return trip to San Francisco: British Airways flight 287, departing Heathrow at 12:45 Sunday the 23rd arriving San Francisco at 3:25 that afternoon. On the outbound flight there was a German family traveling on the same flight with a young son named Esben. We learned his name from the number of times the parents called after him and the girls found him cute. On the return trip, Esben and his parents were also on board getting back to the workaday world in California.