Today I had to drive into the City for a very important meeting. I won’t bother to explain what I do because no one, not even my closest family members, can remember it five minutes after I’m finished talking. Their eyes begin to glaze over as soon as I say “consultant”; they perk up a bit when they hear “drugs,” but are practically catatonic by “process improvement.” I sometimes regret that I don’t have a “movie job” that would be easier to explain to Aitch when he gets older. A movie job is a career that can be assigned to a character in a film because it is easy for the audience to grasp without a lot of exposition — e.g., teacher, district attorney, call girl.

As I was dressing for the meeting in a freshly-pressed pink suit, I thought, “It’s so great to wear nice clothes. Why don’t I get dressed up more often?” Then I went downstairs and was squarely confronted with “why”: Every available surface, including those belonging to the various inhabitants of my house, is dotted with potential contaminants. I shudder to contemplate the vast heaps of irrelevant evidence that CSI would collect should some heinous crime be perpetrated in my kitchen. “That powder we found? We took it to trace, and it turns out it was the dust of a whole boxful of pulverized graham crackers.” “Hmm, the perp must have been pretty angry to have inflicted that kind of damage. Definitely a crime of passion. The killer knew his victim.”

As I was maneuvering slowly around The Big Dig, I decided to make some phone calls to pass the time. Anyone who’s ever driven in Boston knows what a dicey proposition this is. The roads around the Dig are re-routed weekly, rather like the staircases at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. Anyway, I called the Port City clerk’s office, where I had obtained Aitch’s birth certificate, to find out with which state agency I could file a complaint regarding the missing apostrophes.

As it happens, the birth certificate form is not state-mandated, but is local to Port City, so I was able to complain directly to the City Clerk. I started off politely enough, but then he took the annoying tactic of trying to argue me out of my opinions. I believe that’s when I opined that the birth certificate looked like something an illiterate high school student mocked up on his PC. The clerk kept going on about the security features in document — magnetic stripes, seals, watermarks, and so on. I got a little impatient, because I wasn’t worried about how easy it would be to fake the document, but rather how valid the document appeared to the average person — say, the US or Korean government officials who might review Aitch’s birth certificate in support of our second adoption.

The City Clerk could not promise to correct the certificate form, because there was no money in the budget to have the super-special trained administrator with the secret password to the forms database come in for five minutes to add some apostrophes.

A few hours later, when I was still at the meeting, the City Clerk called our house and spoke to Husband, who was unaware that I had called. The clerk filled Husband in on the controversy — “Your wife yelled at me” — and said that he had taken my concerns into consideration and would correct the form as soon as the money was available. I’ve since found out, though, I can request a birth certificate from the State that will be based on a different template, possibly one that is punctuated correctly. So sorry, Massachusetts, for maligning you earlier. I hope you can come through for me now.