ShavinHas this ever happened to you? You’re halfway to the Atlanta airport, aboard the cushy raft that is the Groome Transportation shuttle. You’re in a heated [text] conversation with your husband (who is in Denver) over something that is unfolding in your professional life, when a disturbing thought arrives in your brain: I don’t have my driver’s license.
You’re tempted to push the thought away but can’t. Due the airlines’ pesky insistence upon ID to fly, you know you should probably check your wallet, so you do. PetSmart giftcard, check. Visa card, check. Tiny wooden handpainted Patron Saint of Journalists from San Miguel de Allende, check.
“I frgt my drvrs lic!!!!” you text your husband. He responds with a phone call you don’t want to take because you are self-conscious about talking in a crowded van. You don’t want people alarmed for you or pitying you. You want to look like just another able traveler. But the fact of the matter is you are not an able traveler, and you have no idea where your license is.
You answer the phone and hatch a plan. Have the dogsitter race to your home, unlock 25 locks, grab your passport, relock 25 locks, and race at breakneck speed to the Groome office, where they will hand it off to the next driver going to the Atlanta airport. This will work! Now with nothing to do but turn the air vents on and off 100 times in accordance with your hot flashes, you have time to reflect.
What, you say, this has never happened to you? Well, it’s happened to me a few times. When I was 17, a boyfriend’s father took his family and me to Puerto Rico. Then, too, I forgot my driver’s license, a fact I only discovered at the airport. Fortunately, this was pre-airline security, and I could have flown with a saber in my teeth had I been so inclined, so the absence of ID was not a problem.