I located Bryan’s birth certificate
yesterday so he could renew his driver’s license yesterday. Actually he has
three certificates—the elegant, colorful Italian birth certificate in two
languages that certifies that he was born in Vicenza, Italy, the official
certificate of birth from the base (with notarized signatures) that indicates
his birth on the military base at Caserma Ederla, Vicenza, Italy, and the
official one (and the only one that counts) the record of birth abroad at the
embassy in Milan, Italy, that required birth certificates of both Ed & I,
our marriage certificate, our passports, and his birth certificate from the
hospital at Caserma Ederla. The last was the only one the Driver’s License
Bureau would accept as legal proof—the others were pretty, but worthless.
It was ironic that when we went to
the city offices in Vicenza to get the Italian certificate, they originally printed
that he was born on 30 February instead of 30 January. I tried to explain to them
in my inadequate Italian that the date was wrong; there was no 30 February—not
even in Italy. They argued with me for a few minutes, trying to set straight
the foolish Americans, before they realized their error and corrected it. Ed
has always wished he could have kept the birth certificate with the incorrect
date, but they destroyed it quickly; I was just glad to get one with the
correct date so we could get the paper work done to get Bryan’s papers so we
could get him papers to certify him as an American and bring him back to
America with us.
Another interesting sideline to
Bryan’s birth abroad; he does not have dual citizenship by being born in Italy.
The Italian law does not grant any rights to an individual born in their
country as America does; you retain the citizenship of your parents. However,
if your parents or grandparents or great-grandparent’s heritage is Italian, no
matter how many generations removed from Italy, you can regain Italian
citizenship. So Bryan is as American as if he were born in Utah.
The correct birth certificates are
very important as Ed found out when we lived in Hawaii. Normally military
personnel do not need passports as long as they are on military business; their
military ID serves as a passport. In the good old days you did not need a
passport to travel to Mexico or Canada, so we could travel to both of those
countries without a passport, and we traveled to Mexico often as we were
stationed in El Paso, Texas on the border of Mexico.
However in 1980 when we
lived in Hawaii, Ed & I decided to travel to Japan and Korea on Space-A
(Space Available—or military flights wherever there was room). To do this, we
both needed passports. Ed pulled out his Idaho birth certificate to get a
passport and we discovered that all we had was the hospital certificate (similar to
what Bryan had), and it didn’t count as an official birth certificate. We were
in a terrible time crunch to get an official state birth certificate so Ed
called his sister who worked at the Idaho state capital and she obtained a copy
of his birth certificate (not nearly as “pretty” as his hospital certificate)
and over-nighted it to us in Hawaii. With that, we were able to get a passport
and our visas in time for our trip.
That experience really impressed upon
me the importance of true official documents; I also realized how often true
documents are not as pretty as fancy unofficial documents.
I later extended
this analogy to people—some people come in very charming, attractive, pretty,
striking packages that influence people.
Other people come in very plain, unattractive, official-looking, simple
packages that don’t enthrall or excite people; however these people are often honest,
hardworking, dedicated, loving, and very valuable. That isn’t to say that
charming, attractive people cannot be wonderful, but so often we overlook the
simple people because they don’t stand out. Yet they might be just as honest,
upright, intelligent, and full of integrity as those who stand out.
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