When I put down my quill yesterday, I was just about to get married. In Fort Worth, Texas. Not an everyday event in a small-town German scientist’s life! I arrived in Texas at night. Circling, in preparation for landing, over a vast expense of glittering lights, located in the middle of apparent endless darkness. My destination, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, surrounded by ranch- and farmland. Such an immense area of low-density population is completely foreign to western Europeans, where land, space really, is at a premium and one settlement often merges into the next. But I will have to get back to my valuable first impressions of Texas and the USA at large at a later time, we’re slipping way off subject here!
The point of this chapter is our marriage license and the spelling mistake therein. The Tarrant County county clerk misspelled my middle name on our license, which we never corrected. Why would we? Who cares? Possibly a diligent Costa Rican civil servant, examining and reviewing all those documents, which we have to submit for the consideration of residency status. Remember those super-certified-über-authenticated papers? Among them a birth certificate for a Claudia Maria and a marriage license for a Claudia Marie. What to do? Neither the county clerk with power over the County of Tarrant, nor the Office of Vital Statistics in Austin could contribute any useful ideas – I didn’t consider the suggestion to get divorced and re-married specially useful, my bad. Ultimately our district’s Justice of the Peace offered his wisdom in the shape of an affidavit, swearing that Maria and Marie are one and the same person. Hallelujah! But before we truly brake out in song, let’s await the Costa Rican judgment!!
That’s it for tonight. Until soon.
NOT IN A STRAIGHT LINE by Photolera Claudinha 