Quest for passport

Friday morning, my husband called me, “The company wants me to fly to England next week to work with a customer who is having a problem. I need a passport.”
“It took weeks to get passports when the guys went on overseas mission trips,” I reminded him.
“My flight leaves in 10 days. There’s a business that gets passports in three days if I send them my birth certificate, a passport picture and the necessary papers from the post office.”
A couple hours later, he called from home, “Where’s my birth certificate? I found everyone else’s but mine.”
“Did it get stuck in another desk drawer?”
“I checked all of them. Could it be in the safe deposit box?”
“I don’t think so, but take the key and check it out.”
He drove into the bank and looked. It wasn’t there. After he had a passport picture made, he had everything for a passport except his birth certificate.
That evening my daughter and I went through those desk drawers half a dozen times. He had not overlooked it. We gave up. But he didn’t.
Saturday night, he outlined a plan to get his birth certificate from his birth state, Indiana. “I’ll leave for Indiana early tomorrow morning. Go to the county offices Monday morning and get a birth certificate. I can drive to Chicago and start the paperwork for getting a passport by the end of the week.”
As he gathered up his stuff Saturday night, he wandered through the living room, “Where is that passport application?”
“I saw a couple in the trash. Did the copy you want get tossed along with them?”
“No, I just had it,” he said. With copies of passport applications at every post office in the country, I wasn’t worried. By bedtime, his passport application was packed beside his passport picture.
At 1 a.m. Sunday he woke, dressed and told me “I’m going to withdraw a hundred from the bank’s Automatic Teller Machine.”
I murmured a sleepy, “OK.”
He said good-bye, walked out of the bedroom and came back, “I can’t find my ATM card. I had it yesterday when I paid for the picture. But I can’t find it now,” I sighed sleepily. “Check the pockets of your clothes and jacket. If you don’t find it take mine.”
He didn’t find his ATM card. He took mine. He left. I snuggled back deep into the warm bed.
The trip to Indiana, the county health office and Chicago at the base of the skyscraper where the passport company operated. They sent him to a federal building. He waited in line for an hour to finalize the paperwork for his passport.
Assured he’d have the passport in time, he walked back to the car. It wasn’t there. He hadn’t lost it. It had been towed away for illegal parking. For $115, they let him inside the gate where it was impounded.
Early Tuesday morning, he arrived home in time for a short nap before he went to work. He lost a couple’s nights of sleep, but he now has three copies of his birth certificate and a passport to travel internationally at moment’s notice.


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