Mid-day plane to Massachusetts
Several summers ago, my then-girlfriend and I planned a getaway to Montreal, to coincide with an academic conference I was attending. We were living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we planned to drive to Quebec. On Saturday morning we packed the car, loaded the CD binder, cracked the Diet Cokes—we were ready to roll. We stopped at my office to grab my passport—which I opened only to discover that it was expired. I guess my brain had just remembered the expiration date as “infinitely in the future,” and it never occurred to me that the infinite future would one day arrive. We drove home and my girlfriend, much annoyed, stormed off while I tried to figure out what to do. At the time, you could get into Canada with a driver’s license and a birth certificate—but my birth certificate was in Minnesota. FedEx wouldn’t deliver on Sunday—but for a few hundred dollars, they would deliver in a single day. Rather than miss the conference and the vacation, we bit the bullet. At twilight that day, I was waiting on our stoop in Cambridge when a shady-looking, unmarked sedan pulled up. A man got out and handed me a notarized copy of my birth certificate, flown in straight from St. Paul. My girlfriend and I got in her car and left immediately, arriving in Montreal in the early morning. She forgave me, but neither of us were as perky the next day as we would like to have been for the geodesic sphere at Parc Jean-Drapeau. – Jay Gabler

Baby footprints
In one of my last Drivers Ed classes, we received forms about what kind of identification we were supposed to bring for our big test. At the bottom of the form, it said, “DO NOT BRING THE CERTIFICATE WITH YOUR BABY FOOTPRINTS. THAT IS NOT A PROPER FORM OF IDENTIFICATION.” I pictured the sweaty bro sitting next to me bringing dainty little baby footprints to his test and then whipping out his own feet, gesturing that the swirls were indeed the same. Did this really happen frequently enough to necessitate the all caps warning? I giggled so hard that I got kicked out of class. – Becky Lang

Let no man tear asunder
When I was fourteen I needed a copy of my birth certificate so I could obtain a passport to go on a trip with my church. When I went into our scary basement storage room to retrieve it, I discovered that it had been ripped entirely in two and, shockingly, they wouldn’t accept it as a form of identification. My angsty teenage mind went wild with this, postulating all sorts of bizarre theories, the most plausible (I thought at the time) being that there must have been some paternity dispute that ended in the symbolic destruction of my birth certificate. I assumed that like any good WASP is wont to do, they resolved the issue not with DNA tests or divorce filings, but rather quietly filed it away in the depths of our storage room. – Sarah Heuer