Undocumented

I have a recurring dream that I am at the airport to catch some international flight and I realize that I have forgotten my passport. Beyond that, the details change: sometimes I'm trying to fly to Paris, sometimes London, sometimes other places, and I always try to make it home to get my passport, by car or taxi or even bus, but the dream changes before I do. 

Last night I had a dream where in the dream I actually dreamed I forgot my passport, and so I remembered it for the trip. I'd like to think that's progress.

I actually had a real experience that might be partially responsible for the dream. When I was in high school in Switzerland a lot of us took the 3 AM train to Zurich at the end of the fall term. The timing was right to make our mid-morning flights to the States, or Libya, or Tehran, or Algeria, or Nigeria, or, in my case, Saudi Arabia. A train full of teenagers in the middle of the night was pretty much a big party-- there was no sleeping, of course, and a lot of moving from one compartment to another, and some drinking, and we all were pretty bleary-eyed by the time the train pulled into the Zurich Bahnhof. 

I got my plane ticket and passport out and set them on the small table beneath the window in the six-seat compartment, and pulled my orange backpack from the overhead rack. Shouldering the pack, I turned and followed my friends through the sliding door, into the narrow corridor, and down the folding stairs onto the platform. It was only when I reached in my pocket for the 5 franc coin I needed to pay for the airport shuttle bus on the other side of the station that I realized what I had left behind. I waved good-bye to my friends (they had planes to catch!) and ran back to the track we had come in on, but the train was gone. 

What followed was a lot of me explaining my plight in English to people who spoke German. I finally ended up in a stuffy office within a cavernous luggage storeroom. A very stern looking man frowned at me as he punched the buttons on a putty-colored phone and held the receiver to his ear. He spoke at length, in German of course, to the person on the other end, as I fidgeted with my watch and wondered what I would do if I missed my flight home. "

Zey haff it," he told me when he hung up, "and zey are sending it on ze next train." 

"What time?" I asked him, pointing at my watch. 

"Drießig minuten" he answered.Thirty minutes.

It was tense, but I made the plane, and I had almost forgotten about the whole ordeal when we landed. My dad, who worked for the airline, used his badge to meet me on the tarmac, and as we walked toward the terminal he said, "What happened to your passport?"

I stared at him, speechless for a moment. "I left it on the train! How did you know?" I asked.

He just squeezed the back of my neck and shook his head. I was so tired, I let it drop. And to this day, I have no idea if he really knew what I had done, or if it was just a lucky vote of no confidence.