What does one do to commemorate the finalization of a 30-year mortgage? To celebrate the closure of an onerous task: opening the checkbook and writing a check with many zeros 360 times… to be the owners of the home and not the bank!

Here’s what we did: spend the amount of a monthly payment to purchase two tickets to the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony!

Yes, the timing was perfect: after the final check was mailed, tickets for the annual event were made available to the public. However, when the appointed time arrived, early morning on the West Coast (The Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony was in Cleveland, Ohio, three time zones to the east)…

And, the tickets were gone within four minutes!

So we were consigned to StubHub, a ticket broker site, where we barely snagged two seats in the corner of the back of the hall, third level… priced at 10 times the face value of the tickets! Yikes! Oh, but we had a credit card and no mortgage to pay – go for it!

And, we did! We were bound for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Ceremony in April!

Thrilled, at any price, because one of the inductees is the perennial never-wins, the Moody Blues, a band that we’ve seen in concert multiple times and are favorites of ours. Money well spent – and available because of our freedom from house payments.

So, the big weekend arrived. We flew to the Midwest, where our friends picked us up at the airport and took us to their home. We settled in, unpacked our bags, and began to pleasantly sip wine, savoring the upcoming adventure. As we shared our ticket purchase ‘episode’ – forget the price – our host and hostess, who’d been able to buy tickets before all were sold, wanted to compare seat placement… friendly like!

And, that’s when we learned that we’d failed to pack our tickets along with ourselves and our bags! Oh no!

Problem-solving began instantly – no blaming or shaming involved – and a workable plan evolved sumptuously, organically. Applause!

My husband called his best buddy, Fernando, in California thousands of miles west. Fernando had a key to our home because of some remodeling he and his crew had done. Larry explained our predicament and made a request.

Fernando had a heart and spare time.

He raced to our home, unlocked the door, dashed to the kitchen and found the tickets in the place we explained that they were: a canister that no longer held sugar, but event tickets instead. He snapped a picture of each ticket and messaged them to us in Ohio.

As ‘insurance’ he also scanned the tickets and emailed them to our friends in Ohio who printed them out. An Epson did the extra deed.

Life as a Miracle. A life best-lived with a little help from friends.

Rock on!