High Anxiety

No, not the Mel Brooks movie of the same name but the kind of anxiety that grips you when you can’t find something you know is in the house.

I got the call on my cell at about 10:30 this morning as I was leaving Dunkin' Donuts after our morning tennis game. (No we don't play tennis at DD but going there for coffee afterward is a tradition). My wife was upset. She said she was frustrated. To my ear it sounded like panic. The problem was she couldn’t find our tickets for tomorrow's performance by Itzhak Perlman at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC). (Did she think I had them in my tennis shorts?)

Trying to be as reassuring as I could, I said I'm on my way home and I'll help you look for them. When I got home, I too, could not find them.

The tickets had been clipped to my wife's date book for three months. This morning, when she went to her desk to check the time of the performance the tickets were not there.

We looked everywhere we thought they logically could be. Nothing. Look, I said, when we least expect it and we're not looking for them they'll appear.* Meantime, we called our friend who had charged the tickets and told her what happened.

No problem. She called the PAC and they had no trouble printing duplicates for us to pick up at the box office. Problem solved, an uneasy serenity returned.

You guessed it. (See*). After dinner we're discussing shopping Monday. My wife picks up a discount coupon for a store she wants to visit and clipped to the back of the coupon are the missing tickets. We'll tell our friends in the morning.

We won't tell Itzhak. He should just play nicely.