The flight attendant at the blizzard-encircled airport called out “Passenger Sullivan, Gulfport”.  He then called out the names of other folks presumably waiting there as well.  Some of my fellow travelers were going to places like Cancun.  I thought that might be a good new name: Passenger Sullivan Gulfport. As I had given myself a 90% probability of not being able to leave that day (hundreds of flights had been cancelled and I had volunteered to be bumped), when he summarily took my bag and checked it, I looked at him in surprise and asked “what do I do now?”.  He looked at me and said, “Your bag is gone, go to your gate.”    My gift to the unknown standby would remain unrequited, the world would move forward, I was leaving town as planned.

As soon as we gained altitude and broke through the clouds, the rest of the trip was all bathed in sunshine.  In the final leg of the trip, I was the aisle seat completion of a threesome, my fellow passengers being a grandmother returning home to the Gulf Coast after the holidays, and a young psychologist who was interviewing the next day for an internship at a hospital in Biloxi.  The two were talking quietly, as quietly as one does at 30,000 feet, when I recognized the name of the hospital that the psychology student mentioned.  All it took to join the conversation was to ask if I had heard the name of the hospital correctly.  Bingo.  We were an instant small group of three, as transient as transient can be, hitting it off.  Conversation drifted into clinical matters, new approaches to work with trauma, and the grandmother, a long time resident of the coast, began to talk about Katrina, and Camille before that.  The plane began to descend, the sun was now starting to set.  The plane banked and both the long time resident and myself, very short time resident, pointed out the barrier islands, the Gulf, the beaches below.  The student murmured that this would be a nice place to spend her internship year.

The long time resident had been talking about visiting property she had in Pass Christian, three months after Katrina.  She recalled driving out to the property along the coast, and seeing that there were no buildings in sight.  When she got out of the car, she realized that there were no birds in view, that there was no sound at all, other than the wind.

The sun had by now nearly set, a deep crimson on the horizon.  The long time resident was glad to be back home, the student was excited about her interviews the next day, and I was relieved to have completed the day’s journey, needing now only to get the cab for the final 30 miles along the coast road back to Bay St Louis.  We bid adieu to each other.  There was a new lightness to the evening, to the immediacy of the moment, to the possibility of connection in the most uncertain of times.