Ticket to Ride?

My sister the Harvard graduate cannot speak English. This confirms my suspicions that American schools have no respect for the sanctity or preservation of our native language. At the risk of sounding like I live or belong in Arizona, though, I suppose I shall desist from any suggestion of a law requiring correct English grammar upon high school graduation.

I digress.

My sister the Harvard graduate has many amazing qualities. However, she possesses neither a grasp of English grammar (this includes simple verb conjugations; she composes sentences like, “I drunk that beer”) nor the wherewithal to juggle travel plans. Usually this is not an issue since someone in my family takes care of it for her.

Usually that person is me.

Due to my travel-happy summer plans, I booked my tickets for Harvard graduation separately from the rest of my family and left them to their own devices. I thought it might be a good exercise in reality for them.

Unfortunately I was wrong. On Friday at 11pm, after a long day of moving SB out of her dorm, my father went to print our boarding passes in the hotel’s business center and discovered that no one ever booked a flight for my sister.

At first I assumed Delta had made some mistake. “Just pull up the confirmation Daddy emailed you after he booked it,” I said. When Daddy interjected that his business manager booked the tickets, I revised my statement only slightly.

“What confirmation?” SB asked.

“Surely you asked for someone to email you your flight information,” I answered, suddenly unsure.

Perhaps by now you have guessed that the oversight was not, in fact, Delta’s. The next morning all four of us schlepped to the airport at 6am – several hours before our scheduled flight – where we met the Annie Sullivan of Logan Airport and managed to all hop on the 7am. Three of us even flew first class. SB developed a nasty cold from two weeks of pre-graduation partying and stirring up massive dust bunnies while packing, so we relegated her to coach.

Of the experience the Judge said, “Well, at least from now on you’ll always check to make sure you have a ticket!”

Sorry, Mom, but I respectfully disagree. Last Tuesday, before the arrival of our parents, SB and I walked fifteen minutes across the Charles river to attend a class picnic. When we reached the entrance she remembered that she left our pre-purchased $20/plate tickets in her room and we had to wait for another friend to bring them before eating. SB made a comment similar to the Judge’s after that evening. The next day when we met our parents outside of the Harvard Yard picnic* (the one with the lunchboxes) I asked my sister if she had remembered our tickets for that meal. She turned very still and a little pale before slowly shaking her head and trotting back to her room to fetch them.

Let me be clear: I do not claim the title of smartest cookie for myself. Once last year SB returned from the lab she worked in with nasty horizontal cuts on her finger. When I asked her what happened she told me one of the lab’s zebra fish bit her. Horrified, I suggested she get real medical attention rather than just covering the wound with a Band-Aid, the way she was doing. She shrugged, unconcerned. Two days later she told me that zebra fish – at least the ones at her lab – are itsy microscopic things and that she’d cut her finger on a tape dispenser. She thought it was really funny.

Of course, even this cookie has never failed to confirm the existence of her plane tickets.


*Harvard is big on picnics.