I need (to be) a hero

I wanted to be a hero. That’s how it started.

But really it started because we were caught between a Twenty One Pilots and a Panic at the Disco phase in our daughter’s life, and as Christmas approached, we bought the wrong tickets.

I couldn’t get Twenty One Pilots tickets for the Greensboro show. So my wife got some for the Memphis show this weekend. And that was that.

But then I was able to get some Twenty One Pilots tickets for the Greensboro show, not through any social acumen but only because I was on Facebook at just the right time.

I made arrangements to purchase these tickets — at cost, I should add — from some very nice people. I will not pretend that the street value of these tickets never entered my mind; I was fully aware that I could have flipped these suckers for $175 apiece without breaking a sweat. But by then I was starting to feel this hero thing, the guy who pulls a pair of miracle tickets out of thin air at the last minute. I’m that guy.

My daughter must have sensed this feeling in me, and so she broke it to me calmly and sweetly.

Because she was already going to a Twenty One Pilots show, you see, and this friend of hers was not going to the Memphis show but she was going to the Greensboro show, until this other girl, who is kind of a mean girl, told her at the last minute that she was going to give her extra ticket to someone else, and now my daughter’s friend had been crying about the whole thing all day.

And that’s why, she told me, that she offered her friend the Greensboro tickets.

Just like that the whole thing flipped. Instead of trying to earn the adulation of my daughter — a commodity that grows more rare, it seems, with each passing year — I found myself admiring her in that way a father does when he realizes that, despite his many shortcomings, he has managed to bring just a little bit of light to the world.

Now she’s my hero. That’s how it ends.