I’m going to tell you a story in the form of a timeline, with the real point at the end which is almost totally unrelated to the timeline. Bear with me.

Friday, August 19th, 2005
7:10pm, Ryde Ferry Terminal – tearful goodbyes with Katina and Keith, Stuart’s parents. In lieu of anything useful to say in the face of so much heartbreak, I say several times that we’ll be back at Christmas, it won’t be too long, just three months.
7:20pm, Wightlink Ferry – as the boat is pulling away from IoW, I casually ask Stuart if he has the Advanced Parole, which is the document that is the only reason we were able to leave the US before his Permanent Resident Interview and other things that start with capital letter of Importance.
7:20:02pm – Stuart blinks and goes, “AP?”
7:20:03 to 7:30pm – I proceed to fucking totally and completely lose my fucking shit as Stuart frantically searches through his bag over and over again, saying that he’d taken it out over the course of the week and didn’t remember where he’d put it or whether he’d put it back into anything we were carrying with us.
7:35pm – We land at Portsmouth, me crying like I simply cannot stop crying, Stuart grim-faced and totally freaking out about both the lost document and his wife who is now a small puddle on the deck of the ferry indistinguishable from the seawater.
7:40 to 7:44pm – I proceed to simultaneously freak out, rip apart our suitcase and call my dad on my dwindling-powered cell phone to tell him to call the INS and ask what the ramifications of this are. I already know the ramifications – without that document, Stuart cannot come back into the country unless they give us a break and acknowledge that they did grant it to us, otherwise he is seen as having abandoning his case progress and OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK HELP. Stuart is meanwhile on the payphone desperately trying to get in touch with his parents to tell them to turn around, come back to Ryde, pick us up so we can go home and tear the bedroom apart and freak out some more. It was a hectic four minutes.
7:45pm – we get on the next island-bound ferry and give the man 17GBP for a two same-day return tickets, and he assures us that we’d only have to pay a couple pounds extra for a morning ferry if needs be. Actually, he totally fucking up and LIED and we found out back on the island that it would cost us another 11 pounds to take the morning ferry and I swear, I hate ferry monopolies so much, SO FUCKING MUCH, anyway whatever.
7:50-7:55pm – I continue to freak out and cry. Stuart asks me to stop crying or else he’s going to lose it. I try to stop crying. I am functioning on the principle that if 1. you don’t have something and 2. you don’t know where it is, then 3. there’s no reason it’s not completely lost to you forever. This is a depressing ideology. Stuart worries that I am mad at him. I tell him with tears streaming down my face that if we just find this goddamned thing, I won’t ever care, I won’t ever be mad, I just want to find it.
7:56pm – I’m freaking out to Stuart that he’d thrown it away with the NYT that had been in his bag. He says, “but I didn’t throw the Times away! It was on the dresser! And now it’s just in the bin, IN the bedroom!” And suddenly the heavens part. A mental picture snaps into my head, almost unbidden, to my mind: something fell behind the dresser a few days before. Something that had been on top of the newspaper. Something I’d just assumed was a stupid flyer or leaflet. SOMETHING PAPER, SOMETHING THAT HAD BEEN THE AP. OH MY GOD IT’S BEHIND THE DRESSER. I cry again, just out of relief, and because it’s become something of a habit for the last 20 minutes.
8:00pm to 9:30pm – we land in Ryde and spend the next hour and a half trying to get through to Stuart’s family to have someone come pick us up and look behind the dresser. Meanwhile, dad has confirmed the bad news, that the INS officer had said our “best shot” would be to just fly to JFK as planned and put ourselves at the mercy of the INS officers there, riding on the theory that at least they’d only detain Stuart for 24 hours which would be long enough to try and solve the problem. Heh. DETAINED. I cry out of relief again, and hope to a god I don’t even believe in that I’m right, that it’s behind the dresser. I try to stop crying when Stuart brings me the world’s shittiest hot cocoa from the vending machine. He says, “I’m such a twerp.” To make him feel better, and to prove solidarity, and because I’M THE ONE THAT LET THE DAMN THING FALL BEHIND THE DRESSER, I say, “well, then I’m missus Twerp.” And I am.
9:30pm – Keith shows up at the terminal, having been told by Stuart’s sister (who was the only person we’d managed to locate) that we’d lost something and needed fetching. Keith was a hero about it, not even berating Stuart and I even further for our stupidity, just offering us a small travel-document case that was identical to the one he and Katina use to travel. I cry just from the relief of the bear hug he gave me when he picks us up. When I tell my dad it’s been found, he tells me I’d better find the next Greek Orthodox church and say several prayers to several saints for Stuart’s and my bafflingly continuous good luck in the face of our own stupidity. The next day I will drunkenly charge Jen with this task. I hope thankfulness prayers work by indirect lines.
9:45pm – We walk into the house, knowing that Katina has managed to locate the paper behind the dresser, and find her sitting in the kitchen looking tired but happy to see us again. My face must have said how mortified and awful I felt, because the first thing Katina says is, after a pause, “Merry… christmas”.
9:45- to 10:30pm – Katina, Stuart, Keith and I laugh our heads off about how funny this is, how ridiculous it was, how fantastic family is. We tuck in for the night after a much-needed glass of wine. When getting into bed, Stuart finds Bow Bear. Seems we didn’t realize we’d come home for more than just the papers.
Saturday, August 20th, 2005
7:15am – exactly 12 hours later, we board the same ferry to Portsmouth. We see the same ticketing agent, who does a double take at this family that can’t seem to get it right the first time. There are a few less tears, there are a few more laughs, and the second goodbye goes down a little better than the first.

The moral of the story isn’t that we now know how to carry documents around, or even that I managed to get my teddy bear the second time around. It’s that Katina said Merry Christmas and made me laugh for the first time in hours, and family is always good to come home to. Twice.