Welcome home

We spent an extra hour at Dulles while the new, friendlier CIS (formerly INS) made Ewa wait in a fetid little room with 50 people, 80 of whom seemed to be screaming children, so they could check the stamp in her passport. For those of you who haven't navigated our nation's immigration system, the CIS stamps one's passport in advance of actually issuing "green cards." In our case, Ewa had received her actual card a few months before, but with the wrong country of birth. Their mistake, their problem, right? Oh no. It's up to us to go down to Norfolk and spend a day in a fetid little room there with 50 other people and then wait another six months for a replacement card.

So the stamp will have to do for the time being, but it is no fun standing outside of that little room balancing your baby on your belly while you try to squeeze him into his stroller after collecting all your luggage on your own. I was making contigency plans--does anyone I know know a good immigration lawyer, a Maurice Levy from The Wire type who'd burst in and put a halt to whatever they were doing to her in there? But then I happened to ask a guard if there were any place I could wait for Ewa that didn't involve me trying to keep our luggage cart and stroller from being knocked over by French tourists making a beeline for the weak dollar. He took her name and got her out of line (she'd have been in there at least a couple more hours had I not asked). Never, never underestimate the power of carrying a baby.

Actually, go ahead and underestimate it. Outside in the taxi line the dispatcher sent us to a too-small cab; when we tried to get a bigger one the drivers all tried to turn us away. Finally after I lost my shit at the dispatcher, he forced one of the drivers to take us. The guy was a real prince, flinging our luggage into the back of his SUV and cursing, then overcharging us for "extras," then driving like a lunatic down the Dulles Toll Road and complaining about the dispatcher. I'm sorry, did I miss something? Why is our fare so much worse than anyone else's? We got his hack number, and Washington Flyer had better make this shit right.

Drove straight home to Richmond, noting that while we'd seen almost nothing but Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers on the way out of town on Election Day, there were nothing but W. stickers in evidence now. Much sighing.