We were scheduled to leave Sea Tac at 0830 on the morning of June 26th. We’d spent much of the prior week with a list of things we needed to get done before we left. Most mornings I’d sit eating oatmeal and add to, or cross things off of, the list. It had been four years since we actually left town for any period of time and we wanted to be sure that we had everything covered.
I should have known something was going to go pear shaped when we’d finished The List before Anastasia showed up on the evening of the 25th.

We wanted to be at the airport by 0615. We thought that flying on a Sunday would maybe keep the crowds a little less crazy and we’d heard that airports have become capital C Crazy. I had checked us in for our flight the day before and (inadvertently) even printed two copies of our boarding passes. They didn’t have our TSA Known Traveler Number on them, but we figured that since we were planning to check suitcases we’d deal with that when we went to check our bags.

We got up at 0500, had breakfast, did our last minute carry-on packing, smooched the kittens (oh yes. any very occasional readers will need to know that Flitter and Pogo are both gone, we remodeled the upstairs of the house, and we’ve got a new pair of kittens. R.T. and Skooch.) and were just on the landing humping our luggage towards the front door when Andrew turned to me and said “I think my heart is doing something funny again.”

Very, very occasional readers (a.k.a. anyone with whom we don’t have frequent contact since I didn’t have the energy to write about that little cross eyed debacle at the time) will have missed the fact that in April, just before we were scheduled to go out of town for the first time in four years, Andrew’s heart developed an electrical anomaly called “Tachy/Brady Syndrome” which is where your heart rate speeds up and slows down abruptly for no particular reason whatsoever. Even to the point of stopping for several (the longest was 11 seconds) seconds at a time. Which involved investigating two hospitals’ emergency departments, one cardiac care unit, the emergency implantation of a dual chamber pacemaker and a (Jesus Christ in the DESERT!) $5000 ambulance trip between Burien and Tacoma. This did, of course, preclude us from leaving town for the first time in 4 years. 2022 has been a real barn burner of a year so far.

So when Andrew told me in late June that his heart felt funny the PTSD from April kicked in. I ran upstairs to grab a stethoscope (you *don’t* keep a stethoscope in your study at home? where do you keep your stethoscopes then?) and listened to what turned out to be a perfectly normal, steady heart rate.

Reassurances offered, we hoiked our luggage into the back of Anastasia’s car and we were on our way to the airport.
But the juju had been cast at that point.

We got to the airport. I got out. I got my purse. Andrew got out. We got our carry on and our two suitcases out of the trunk of Anastasia’s car. We walked to the check in kiosk.
Did you notice something? Did you notice any little deficiency?

I didn’t have the boarding passes.
The boarding passes had our airline confirmation number on them. And our flight number.
The lack of boarding passes, I didn’t know that I’d left them on the back seat of Anastasia’s car until we got to Albuquerque, was annoying but not fatal since we were going to have to get new ones printed with our TSA KTNs on them anyway. And I knew that I had all of the vital information about this trip because I’d very carefully placed every single e-mail that had been generated in planning this trip into a nice, new folder on the desktop of my computer which I then, at Andrew’s suggestion, had e-mailed to myself so I could access the file from my phone. Easy peasy, right?

Wrong.

Wrong because (and Andrew assures me that people who speak Computer will understand what a clusterfuck this is) for some reason Macintosh desktop computers automatically turn those types of folders into Zip files and one can’t un-Zip a Zip file on a mobile device. Or at least not mine.

So we got to the head of the line with our suitcases, a knowledge of our preliminary and eventual destinations, Andrew’s Known Traveler Number, and an e-mail on my phone which was full of information like my KTN, our airline confirmation number, our airline “Frequent Flyer Club” information (for which I’d signed us both up because it was free and of some sort of benefit to us that I have since forgotten), and every other contact and reservation number THAT NO ONE COULD READ.
That’s when I started to hyperventilate.

The nice lady at American Airlines’ ticket counter found our confirmation number and, of course, our flight numbers. She checked our bags. She re-printed our boarding passes. Andrew’s had his KTN on it. Mine, of course, did not. Nice Lady did suggest that we go to the TSA Pre Check line at security, explain the situation, and see whether or not they could find me in their files.
We did. They couldn’t.
That’s when I started to have a panic attack.

I have spent the last two years in a more or less constant state of pronounced germ phobia. I distinctly remember Matt saying something along the lines of “Don’t get this, you’ll die.” (paraphrased, of course) when talking to Andrew about Covid in early 2020. And I had dealt with the fear of leaving our untidy, but distinctly antiseptic, home by taking every precaution I could to be sure that my immune suppressed husband was going to have as minimal contact with The Great Unwashed as could be managed during this trip. The fact that we were standing at the head of the TSA Pre Check line with the nice dude telling me that he had no way of confirming that I had a KTN and Andrew telling me that he wasn’t going to go through the Pre Check line and leave me to go through the regular security line completely blew every gasket I had.

Because he is very familiar with me by now and because he does have a marked degree of authority with regards to the workings of my brain, Andrew did manage to get me calmed down to the point where we actually got through security and to the departure gate. I took a Xanax, we got on the plane, and we figured that the fucks had all been up for this trip.

I just went to thesaurus.com to look at synonyms for “chump” but didn’t like any of the options. The best option I can come up with besides “chump” is quell naiif.