Continental Shift
Portrait by Eryca Green.
It’s been so long since I wrote a newsletter, I'd better start this time last year... January 2021... I’m in Sydney making plans to return home to New York. I'm wary that, technically, I’m allowed a year out of the US on my green card and that year ends March 8th. ”Do not overstay the 365 days” my immigration lawyer has told me... But it's summer in Sydney and we’re living in an almost covid free environment so I’m in no hurry to travel into what seems a rather turbulent world... I wait till the last minute... March 5th I’m checking in at the American Arlines counter at Sydney airport and told I need to go and see Border Force [customs]. There I’m informed I need a travel exemption to leave Australia. I’m insisting that I don't as I’m an American resident and have a Green Card ... defiantly confident in this knowledge as I had repeatedly checked these travel requirements online … yet it seems I've been misled.
The exemption must be applied for online. This may take a day or days or weeks. The customs people direct me to the website and give me a form to sign. I’m told that if and when I do leave I can't return for 3 months “and even then might not be able to get back.” This seems to be issued as a threat …. but daily in the news are stories of people who can't get back to Australia. So perhaps it is just factual information, delivered aggressively.
No-one at the aiport was able to help me any further with the travel exemption. I cancel my flight for that day. It's a Friday. I imagine not much could happen on the weekend so I book the next available flight for ….Tuesday, March 9th. Now I have a new quandary… if I go on March 9th I might be turned back at US customs.
I return to my godson’s house where I’ve spent the last year. We discuss the “quandary”. Do I go or do I stay? He is in favour of the latter option.
Home Office, New York 2000.
Although I pride myself on grasping the fundamentals of Photoshop, I am far more confident with a pair of scissors or a can of paint in hand. I was very slow to understand the concept of a search engine and only in the last few years have used google for this purpose. The area of life where I display perhaps the most significant incompetence is filling out forms and when this task is online I have to multiply the difficulty factor. For me, forms often seem to be written with words and phrases, that, although in my native tongue, appear as a language unknown to me. Questions provoke no straight forward answer. Thus I tend to get stuck.
This is what happened with the travel exemption….the end result being I stayed in Australia.
Consequently life rolled onto plan C or D or E. Not plans that had been consciously lying in wait. They were altogether new plans. As my friend Yvonne says…''There’s always another way of doing something''
Woodstock Garden, 2018.
In April I began to pack up my house in Woodstock NY via Facetime. This task was lovingly and long sufferingly performed by my friend Viktorsha…. rifling thru drawers, cupboards and boxes with me on the other end of the phone saying…”uh-yes — that one” — “oh no Not that one” etc etc... until the house was empty….its contents sold, redistributed or on a ship to OZ.
Late August I am unpacking the boxes [thank you Vik, no breakages]... and by early October quite settled in my new home... an apartment that’s just up the road from my very first one 42 years ago.
Happy New Year
Xm
PS ... Ironically the whole process has inspired an endless trial/trail of forms and paperwork.
Home Office, Sydney 2022.