Losing and Finding

Today I am going to pick up my tickets for my trip in September and after that, supervise children at the library at the Reptiles and Amphibians show this afternoon.

When I booked this trip I was asked if I wanted an E-ticket. No, I don’t. I love to have those pieces of cardboard in my hand, to be able to handle them and put them high on the top of my desk so I can see them and anticipate and gloat…

Which reminds me of the last time I had plane tickets to England and thought I had lost them. I was living in the house I have since sold, the house where I lived for 18 years. In the corner of the living room, right to hand as I went out were shelves that fitted neatly into the corner. I used the open shelves for my candlestick disply but the most useful part of it was that I could put things I didn’t want my kid to get into high up out of his reach and hidden. The shelves were 7 feet high and at the top had a little area behind the decorative top, a really good place to hide small Christmas presents etc. For some strange reason, several years after I had stopped using that as a hiding place, I put my plane tickets up there…

And immediately forgot I had done so…

So, here I was, trying to find my tickets two days before I was going to leave. Now, I knew I hadn’t taken them out of the house, but what I really feared I had done was to throw them away in one of my I-can’t-STAND-this-MESS! cleanups where I swept through the house willy-nilly sweeping piles of stuff into the very large kitchen waste-wasket. I do not exaggerate when I say very large. It was lined with one of those huge bags one buys to collect leaves in and that was only a little bit too big for it. And at that time, we did not recycle, so everything was in there.

After searching all the likely and unlikely places {hey, I once found my tv changer in the refrigerator}, I decided I had to empty this trash container, so I spread another plastic bag on the floor and tipped everything out. There was at least a week’s trash there and the nastiest part was the wet coffee grounds I had thrown in there every morning. Well, I picked though everything, every scrap of grease-stained coffee-soaked paper in there. and found no tickets. So, utterly panicked by this time, I called Gary, my travel agent who was also a friend, and, in tears, told him what had happened. He told me to keep calm. The tickets could be reissued for an additional fee of $75 {ulp!} but I should calm down and go and swim to take my mind off it, and he would bet me lunch that I would remember where they were.

It was dark by that time which meant that I could swim without a bathing suit which is what I did. And, as I was swimming up and down, counting my lengths and concentrating only on stretching my body on the glide stroke, suddenly, out of nowhere I saw myself going out of the living room towards the kitchen and felt my left arm reaching up and putting something, could it be the tickets? on that shelf…

Without pausing to dry off, I got out of the pool and ran, dripping all over the carpets, through my bedroom, down the hall, through the living room and reached up…and, of course, there they were…Whew!

I immediately called Gary and arranged to buy him lunch the next day, the best bet I ever lost..