A few days before Christmas, The Foreigner replies to my email about passports, sent ten months earlier. He finally has time to deal with the matter, he says. When does The Child’s Dutch passport expire?

I reply with only a date – too late.

I expect a response that at least gives me some sense of what game he is playing. I look for clues on his website. It’s changed slightly: the banner now proclaims it his personal website, rather than that of him and his wife. Her picture remains, though, on the About Us portion of the site.

But there are no further clues, and my email receives no reply.

A few weeks pass, and I cautiously ask The Child if she ever replied to his email.

No, she says. I’m going to, but I’ve just been too busy.

I wasn’t the only one not receiving replies from The Foreigner, it turned out: The Child had been exchanging emails with him, an exchange that came to an abrupt stop over the summer, when he told her he was too busy and would write her again when he was less so.

I wondered about this, and checked his website, where he was posting about technology subjects and ranting about the ills of the second Bush administration, six years after it ended.

Fall arrived, and with it, a reply to her email. She told him about her summer volunteer job, helping with swim classes at a local pool. She liked the job because she was outdoors and active and as it turns out, she’s very good at encouraging little kids that the pool isn’t scary, but fun instead. Not only was it fun, she explained, but since she was volunteering, she could count it as community service, which is important on American college applications.

His reply can be distilled down to this: Don’t focus on college, not everyone needs it and you may be one of those that doesn’t. Spend your time having fun, not working.

Initially, The Child was less interested in the content of the message than she was in one of the details he mentioned in support of his College is Unimportant argument: that I had been an English major in college, which had nothing to do with the career path I chose. She was pretty sure I hadn’t been an English major, and wanted to know why he said that.

I could come up with several possible explanations, but since he was at my graduation and most certainly did know my field of study, I just shrug and say he’s being ridiculous. I know the real reason, of course; the man with two Master’s degrees of his own most assuredly does know the value of an education, as well as the cost of one.

The Child appears validated: He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and she’s going to set him straight in her reply. I’m going to college, she says, and that’s all there is to it.

I’m pleased with her determination to educate herself, and tell her so. I’m less pleased with her determination to educate him, but know better than to try to discourage her.

Five years ago, in researching colleges, I discovered some interesting tidbits. One was that many Dutch universities teach courses in English these days. The other was that, if you’re a Dutch citizen, they’re dirt cheap, and you get a government stipend while you study. I wouldn’t have given it all that much thought except for an article in The Economist that I read around that time, discussing the fact that the Dutch government is so generous with benefits like this that they were starting to take steps to disallow dual citizenships.

It wasn’t clear to me whether or not the new rules would apply to The Child, but since it did make sense to try to ensure that she try to maintain her dual nationality at least until her education was taken care of, I contacted the Dutch consulate, who contacted The Foreigner, who within a few days had located all the documents and official stamps required of him. A few months later, The Child and I flew to the nearest Dutch consulate, in San Francisco, to deliver our portion of the documents, as required, in person.

A few months after that, The Child had a second passport, locked in a drawer, where it remained until I looked at it one day early last February and realized two things: first, that it was going to expire with in the year, and second, that The Child and I would need to fly to either San Francisco or Los Angeles to get it renewed, unless of course I wanted to fly to the East Coast.

I emailed The Foreigner, and let him know, so that he could get the documents and I could plan the trip.

I received no reply.