This often-parodied television PSA (Public Service Announcement) aired in the Seventies.
Parents, it's 3:00 p.m. Do you know where your children are?
This PSA was shown more recently to raise awareness about latchkey kids unsupervised after school.
Parents, it's junior year abroad. Do you know where your passports are?
The brochures for parents of college students studying abroad stress having a passport ready just in case of the unthinkable. I wave my passport in front of my son heading off to Italy. Trying to sound like Clint Eastwood's rattlesnake-handling, tobacco-spitting grandma, I snarl, "I've got a passport. Don't make me use it!"
My sum total experience of foreign travel consists of three hours in Matamoros, Mexico, wanting to get my young sons back across the border ASAP. The grown globe-roaming-gnome sons know that I'm ill-equipped for international rescues, so they had better mind their international Ps & Qs.
Still, I was fretting about the Woolly Mammoth heading off on his Big Adventure last time I flew to Nebraska to help my dad. Should I take my passport just in case? I juggled pros and cons while I packed my little red rolling suitcase and my purse.
Home from the trip I realized that my RescueMama passport did not return with me. Where could it be? Under the bed in Nebraska? In Dad's car? In the long-term parking shuttle bus? On the floor at DFW or the Eppley airport terminal? In a landfill somewhere? OR...dun-dun-dun...........in the hands of a terrorist identity thief!
"Don't panic," I told myself.
"You did something logical with the passport," I chanted silently.
"You did NOT shred and recycle the passport accidentally, and besides, what kind of terrorist would sort the cans from the paper and #2 plastic?"
"IT IS WAY TOO SOON TO PANIC," I scolded myself daily.
"Don't call Homeland Security yet! That passport cost seventy-five dollars, and IT WILL TURN UP!"
"If you worry about the passport, the terrorists will have won!," I channeled Dubya.
It's been a long month of internal monologues and fretting. Yeehaw! I woke up this morning and remembered where I put my passport. Now I can stop fretting about it having fallen into the hands of terrorists! It was inside that big, ugly tropical purse that I considered taking last time I flew to Lincoln before deciding it was just too darn big, jungly, and ugly even for me. The fashion police would wand me before I even got to the TSA queue. They would not be lenient even though the purse has plenty of room for the New York Times crossword puzzle and a large extended family of cockatoos.
© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder
No comments:
Post a Comment