My son is leaving for Paris in twelve hours and we can’t
find his passport. His bedroom looks like it was raided by the DEA; the content
of every drawer, shelf and ledge lies in a heap in the middle of the floor.
When I ask him when he last had the passport, my son looks
at me like I’m an idiot.
“How do you expect me to remember? This is mother’s fault.
Mother, what did you do with my passport? This isn’t funny.”
“It has to be here,” I say. “Don’t panic, we’ll find it.”
His sister is downstairs, searching our Honda CRV, while my
wife looks through the file drawer where we keep our important papers: old tax
returns, paid bills, invoices, receipts, warranties, report cards, birth
certificates, Social Security cards, and credit cards we never bothered to
activate. Everything is there, except the kid’s passport.
“Great,” my son says, “I’m not going to Paris after all. Six
months of waiting, six months of anticipation, six months of planning, down the
drain. My life is ruined! I’m texting Winter.” Winter is his classmate and
on-again, off-again friend. They’re in an “on” phase now, and spend hours
texting or Skyping one another. Winter has a younger sister named Spring.
“Don’t say anything yet,” I say, checking the pockets of one
of his coats. “It will turn up. Did you look in your book bag?”
Of course he looked in his book bag. What a stupid question.
My daughter returns from downstairs and reports that the
passport isn’t hiding in the CRV. “Does this mean Gabriel isn’t going to
Paris?”
“I found my passport,”
my wife calls from the other room, “and a pair of earrings I’ve been looking
for. Gabriel, you didn’t give me your passport, you have it and it’s somewhere
in that disaster you call a room.”
“No, it’s not,” Gabriel sing-songs from his room. “I gave it
to you and you lost it. Thanks, mother, for ruining my life!”
“Look under his futon,” my wife advises.
“Done,” I say. “No luck, although I did find two bowls, a
cup, and a box of stale crackers.”
A minute later my mother-in-law calls, wanting to know if
the passport has turned up. “Gaby texted me,” she says. “Where could the damn
thing be? Did you look under his futon?”
While I’m talking to her mother my wife’s cell phone rings;
her sister wants to know if we’ve located the passport. Why, she asks, did we
wait until the night before to locate the passport?
My daughter announces that she is tired of looking and is
retiring to her room to watch the Disney channel. “Too bad Gabriel isn’t going
to Paris. He’s so lame.”
After another twenty fruitless minutes of searching, my son,
beside himself, throws in the towel and calls his teacher to tell her the news;
she urges him to stay calm and continue the search. His iPhone buzzes
repeatedly with text messages from his classmates. His grandmother calls again.
His aunt calls again, and then his cousin Mia. We’ve looked everywhere and are
running out of ideas.
I’m trying not to panic, but the thought of the $3000 plus
this trip cost us has my stomach churning. Adding to my anxiety is the fact
that the $3000 is non-refundable. I can’t count the times we have lectured our
son about taking care of his important things, like his retainer, his glasses,
his student ID card, his iPod and iPhone. The boy is careless and nonchalant
about his possessions. I remember how tickled he was the day his passport came
in the mail, how he danced around his room talking about all the foreign lands
he would visit.
We’ve looked everywhere. It’s growing late. My son’s bags
are packed and standing by the front door. He’s in his room, curled in the
fetal position atop the mound of clothes. “It’s over,” he wails, “I can’t go.
Why is this happening to me?”
“What happened to the blue folder that had every scrap of
paper related to Paris?” I ask my wife. “Where is that folder? I bet his
passport is in it.”
My wife goes to the computer hutch in the living room and
shuffles through a stack of papers, finds the blue folder and, sure enough, the
passport is inside.
When we tell him he is going to Paris after all, Gabriel
says, with all his teenage smugness intact: “See, I told you it wasn’t in my
room.”
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