Christmas at the Airport

Dave arrived at the airport just after 6 am. He was behind schedule as a greasy coating of snow slowed the roads. His taxi had gotten stuck behind cautious cars and the driver was in no hurry. The cab stopped beside the departures entrance, double-parking next to another taxi. Dave paid him and stepped out, the cold air punching him in the lungs as he inhaled. The taxi trunk popped open and the driver unpacked Dave’s two bags, a small, wheeled suitcase and a backpack. He handed them to Dave.

“Here you go, sir,” he said when Dave didn’t respond.

“Oh. Thanks,” Dave said, taking the bags.

“Have a good flight,” the driver offered.

“Sure,” Dave replied, but the cabbie was already gone.

Dave stood outside the terminal. Behind him stretched a freshly frozen expanse of dark land. In front of him beckoned the bright warmth of the airport. He took a deep breath, ignoring the pain of the arctic air. Grabbing his suitcase and shouldering his backpack, he stepped towards the opening doors.

He found an empty seat near the Tim Hortons and sat down, checking the departures board. He tucked his bags under his chair and walked over to order a coffee, watching to make sure security wasn’t about to detonate his luggage.

“Double double,” he said, handing over change.

He took his coffee and returned to his seat. The airport was quiet. A few families filled the tables outside the coffee shop. The central benches, over which the airport banners boasted of its success, were empty. Dave tapped his passport and ticket against his knee.

He sat back, sighing. It was Christmas. He was at the airport. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t meeting anyone.

Again.

This was the tenth straight year Dave had come to the airport at Christmas, passport and tickets in hand, along with a diminishing sense of optimism.

The first year, it was easy. He planned to hop on the plane, fall asleep and awake home five hours later. He had pulled up in a taxi, taken his bags, clutched his passport and ticket. He got as far as the check-in gate when he felt a twist in his stomach. He sat down for a moment, running through what he’d eaten the night before. The pain passed and he tried again. The pain returned. Alarmed, Dave took a seat. The pain abated. He tapped his ticket and passport against his knee. He had plenty of time until his flight, so he wasn’t worried.

Four hours later, he was still sitting, still tapping his ticket and passport against his knee. Every time he stood up and approached the check-in desk, his large and small intestines screwed tightly and Dave returned to his seat.

Five hours after he arrived, his flight finally took off, leaving Dave at the airport. At Christmas.

Shortly after that, Dave departed via taxi.

“Where to, pal?” the driver asked.

Dave gave his address. Then realized it wasn’t his address anymore. He’d moved out the day before, the last step of packing up his old life.

“Just take me to a hotel,” he told the driver.

An hour later he was checked in, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

It took him a year to work up the nerve – and the money – for another attempt.

He got as far as the check-in desk. His intestines wrenched.

He went home.

Now, settling in for his tenth straight Christmas at the airport, Dave was saddened by the thought he might actually leave this year. It had been a long, lonely decade, and he’d come to anticipate his Yuletide reprieve from solitude.

By 7:36am, the airport was picking up. A handful of loose people sat in the central benches and a few more lined the edges. Flight attendants confidently wheeled toward their planes. A crowd gathered at the departures board, scanning for the critical information. So far, pretty good – only a few delays, despite the weather.

Dave checked for his flight, but it wasn’t on the board yet. He checked online – still scheduled to depart Saturday at 2 pm.

That was part of the plan this year – a long lead-in time to acclimatize himself to the idea of leaving.

A woman walked past him, glancing at him. He smiled. Asked her where she was heading.

“Florida,” Shirley said. Fifty-something, blond and smiling, she paused to chat to Dave. She told him she was from Halifax, but was heading south to visit family. This was her sixth straight Christmas in Florida - the first trip came during the Year of Her Divorce. She stayed six months then, seeking solace in the sun, but the trip had gotten shorter every year. This year, she could only spare two weeks. Still, she couldn’t afford anything at all when she was married to ‘that creep’. Divorce had turned out well for her. She had a good job and an even better annual escape to the sun.

In the intervening years, the creep had remarried – and had two strokes. Shirley, meanwhile, was hitting her stride. She hauled her suitcases cheerily down the hall, heading for another fortnight in the sun.

Dave wished her luck.

He used to hate airports – all that lining up, moving around, rushing and waiting, poking and prodding, wands waving, gloved hands unpacking bags, toothpaste confiscated, scissors seized. Airports were landless, timeless torture zones, repeating cycles of amnesia.

Herded this way and that, one felt like a sheep. He used to fight it, but finally broke and embraced his sheepness. You can argue all you want, but you’re going where the shepherd’s rod takes you.

He had a theory that Franz Kafka had seen the future: Franz Kafka had seen airports. The Trial was a traffic ticket next to this.

But over the last ten years, being the motionless piece of a perpetual motion machine, he had grown to appreciate the busy beauty of the airport. Humans arrived as people with problems, but as soon as they stepped through the door, they were stripped of their individuality and became cogs in the perpetual motion machine.

Dave liked becoming an airport cog. He liked the clear sense of purpose, the lack of responsibility. Year-round, he struggled to make sense of his life, to decide what to do next. In the airport, it was easy – machines, flashing signs, elevators, escalators, moving sidewalks and confident staff guided your every step.

How happy life would be, he often thought, if it was all airport.

But most of all, he loved the clean, well-lit space. At home, his world was shadows. Sitting in his living room, drinking tea to the light of the late-night TV, sadness would sink him. He’d roam the streets, looking for an open café, but even then the lighting was low, taking his spirits with it.

Christmas at home was the worst. There is nothing sadder than a single man’s Christmas tree, badly decorated with broken bulbs. He had spent many such blue Christmases before his first failure to launch. He didn’t miss them.

Now, he happily hopped into the taxi to spend Christmas at the airport. The giant wreath hung merrily over the central lobby, trees tucked into every corner and birds chirped carols from the roof.

It was always the middle of the day in the airport. It was always warm, always sunny, even if the sun beamed down from the artificial lights.

Dave could sit, tapping his passport and tickets on his knee, and let life wash over him.

As 9am rolled around, Dave got to the bottom of his coffee. He joined the line for a refill. The woman in front of him chatted to her line mates, clearly excited to be there. In a land of dour faces, Dave wondered why she was so chipper.

“My son,” she beamed when he asked. Mark lived in Ontario and she hadn’t seen him in two years. That’s a very long time when you’re a mother.

“He’s coming home at 4pm on Christmas Day,” she grinned.

Dave smiled too.

“Why are you in the airport today?” he asked. It was Dec. 18, after all. It seemed overly cautious. Flights do arrive early, but not usually by a factor of days.

Turns out Marilyn works at the airport.

Christmas Day, she’d be home preparing the feast. She was dispatching her other son, Andy from Truro, to collect Mark.

“That’s what Christmas is all about when you’re older,” she confided in Dave. “Seeing family.”

Dave nodded, as if he knew.

“We may eat at midnight – I don’t care,” she sighed as she waited in the coffee line. “I’m just excited. It’ll be nice to have my sons, and myself, and the big turkey. That’s Christmas.”

Dave didn’t share with her his ideal of Christmas: alone, in a brightly-lit airport.

He eavesdropped on the man behind him. Dave always eavesdropped. Some people get upset when a stranger yells his life story into a cell phone. Dave hung on every word.

The 40-something guy sporting a too-small coat and a too-tight toque was waiting for his father’s flight from Ottawa. He was chatting to another man, but he wouldn’t say when the flight was due in, nor what his father was doing so far from home, nor even confirm if the visit was Christmas-related.

It was all very mysterious.

Dave was fascinated, and wrote it down.

Dave had a disorder.

He wrote everything down.

It was a helpful disorder, so he didn’t fret about it.

It had started in the spring. He was sitting home, alone, in his dim apartment, doing a crossword.

First clue across the top: “Mr. Foley sings a tribute song to all the _ _ _ _ _ he’s known in this Kids in the Hall classic.”

No problem: “Daves.”

Next clue: “Depressed: _ _ _”

Easy: “Sad.”

Daves sad.

Dave’s sad.

It was a lighting bolt on a dark night: Dave was sad! But seeing it in print, born black and white in the world, had a soothing effect on him. He felt better, staring at the crossword puzzle that declared Daves sad.

Inspired, he filled in the rest of the puzzle right there, not bothering with the clues. He wrote a little story about why he was sad that morning. He made all of the words fit the blank spaces.

He felt a sense of traction: now, he was going somewhere. Life wasn’t just blurring by in a chaotic haze.

Life was being locked down in black and white.

Dave went out to buy another paper.

He filled another crossword.

He soon switched to notebooks, and then a laptop, and obsessively wrote down everything that had ever happened to him.

It didn’t take more than a few weeks to catch up.

He stopped writing and felt that sense of traction fading. The chaos swirled in. He was a lonely man stuck to a big rock flying through space around a mid-sized star in a distant galaxy of a enormously indifferent cosmos.

Dave went for a walk. Saw people. Wrote down what they were doing.

That fed the fire for a while, bringing the universe back down to bite-sized pieces,

but he needed more – he needed evidence that other people’s lives made sense, that they had a purpose and a direction.

So he asked them.

And then wrote it down.

His curiosity was insatiable. From the outside, everybody looked so similar – but from the inside, it was a multiverse of minds.

Back in the airport, the first hub of the morning had passed and the lobby had grown quiet. A man in a green jacket pushing a baby carriage stared up at the arrivals screen.

Dave spotted a well-dressed young couple sitting together on the bench facing the elevator. Two people, one set of luggage. Clearly sitting together, but far enough apart so they didn’t touch. Dave wandered over. Sat beside them.

They weren’t talking, so he had to.

“Where you heading to?” he asked casually.

Ryan filled him in: he was heading to Montreal, but a driving delay meant he’d missed his flight and would be going via Toronto, which meant he had a few hours to kill in the airport. So, he called Julie, who lived nearby.

“We’re friends,” he said. “We used to date. We don’t any more.”

They both laughed at that.

Like Dave, Ryan wasn’t dreading a long stint in the airport. He was actually looking forward to it.

“I like people watching,” he confided.

Ryan had just finished exams and was heading to Quebec for “a bit of partying.”

Julie wasn’t up for it, but she came out to keep him company while he waited.

Dave wondered if they were really through dating. He entertained romantic thoughts of an airport reunion: he had observed that the wheels-in-the-air finality of airport departures had a way of forcing emotions. Bus stations always depressed him: People sitting in dreary waiting rooms, waiting for a grumpy bus to squeal up, disgorge its human contents and swallow up a new meal. Then, the slow pullaway, brakes squeaking, bus rolling over the curb, passengers rolling around, stopping for traffic, edging away.

You could always get off a bus. You could hedge your bets.

Not with airplanes – once you took off, you were gone.

So maybe that would sway Ryan and Juliet, Dave dreamed.

It was getting close to noon. Dave drained another cup, stood up and stretched his legs. Arrivals or Departures?

Arrivals was usually his favourite part of the airport. But Christmas at the Airport #4 had been a bad one. The optimism that he’d actually take flight had faded and he felt stuck in a doorless prison. He was very single, very unemployed. His outlook was bleak. He was dreaming of a drizzly Christmas.

He spent that year at Departures. The sobbing children soothed him. His misery was lightened by the weeping of parting lovers. It wasn’t his proudest moment.

A choir dressed in tartan started singing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire. A dancing Christmas Tree waltzed past the main aisle. Dave followed her down to Arrivals.

A small crowd waited at the glass doors for a west-coast flight. Dave wandered up and waited, too. No one could tell he wasn’t there to greet anyone. You could stand there all day with a hesitant smile on your face, and no one would question you. Everyone was a displaced person at the airport.

He edged up next to a big family. Four women and one baby.

The baby goggled up at him. Dave goggled at the baby. He was wearing a Santa hat and Christmas clothes. His aunt Suzanne informed Dave this was Fisher’s first trip to the airport – and his first Christmas, to go by his size.

His mother, Maryanne, stood closest to the glass doors. Electricity opened them and all the waiters caught their breath.

It wasn’t their sister. Maryanne, Suzanne, Joanne and Jillian (who was Anne? Dave wondered. The missing sister?) stood down.

There was some squabbling over who was the oldest sister.

“We’re all fighting over whose house to go to,” Suzanne joked, not taking her eyes off the door.

Suzanne had spent the last ten years teaching English in China with her husband, an engineer. After a decade wandering the Far East, the heavy gravity of family had pulled them home in 2009.

“This is our first Christmas home in a long time,” Suzanne said, juggling Fisher.

“It’s been rare that we’ve all been together. It feels good. I have a spirit that I haven’t had in a while.”

Dave's smile crumpled. It had been a very long time since he'd felt that spirit. He slipped to the back of the crowd and spared himself the happy reunion.

Back in the main lobby, Dave flopped down on a bench, sighing heavily. The woman on the next bench smiled, trying to catch his eye. With short grey hair and a festive sweater, she was in a very good mood and looking to share her Christmas cheer.

Dave wasn’t sure he could handle another happy story.

He cheered up when Carol from Ontario told him her husband had boogied off with a much-younger salsa dancer. He was rapt when she told him they’d gotten divorced. When she added that she’d lost her job, Dave was hooked.

What’s a girl to do? After her husband did the cha-cha with the salsa dancer, Carol moved to Nova Scotia, bought an old house on the south shore and became a full-time potter in a studio overlooking the water. Lately, she’d been expanding her job to take in long walks on the beach, experimenting with smoke-fired tiles on campfires.

“It’s a lot more fun than doing finances for government,” she told Dave. “At the time, the divorce was devastating, but at this point I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my whole life.”

“Where are you going today?” he asked.

Toronto, then Ottawa, to visit her first grandchild. This was her fifth trip to see Violet in her 11 months on Earth.

“I found out a few days ago that I may be at a convention that my ex and his second wife will be at. I went back to re-assess my wardrobe decisions,” she confessed.

Dave suspected she was also looking forward to the chance to show her ex just what he’d lost. Her renovated life couldn’t be better, she said as she headed off to catch her flight.

To his great surprise, Dave was cheered.

It was nice to know the black hole of pain could be escaped. The event horizon didn’t destroy everything.

By mid-afternoon, the ever-bright airport was starting to wear on Dave. More coffee did not seem a good idea and his flight was still due to take off Saturday afternoon.

He walked through the lobby to the ground floor of the observation deck. It looked cold outside, with a fresh coat of white snow blown across the tarmac.

He was feeling good. He’d done a couple of test runs at the check-in desk and felt only mild upset from his stomach.

The writing was soothing his spirit. The swirling world was settling down. The vastness of the cosmos didn’t seem such a problem from his cozy, well-documented home on Terrarium Earth.

A tired, unshaven, middle-age man sat beside him. Dave glanced at him – jeans, Montreal Canadiens sweatshirt, Montreal Canadiens baseball cap, a bit of a belly. He looked like he’d just got off a long flight.

“Hard trip?” Dave asked.

The Canadiens fan – Will – looked at him blankly, then set the record straight. He lived near the airport and was there to pick up his wife. She was working in Ottawa and travelling back and forth until they sold their Halifax home.

“What time’s her flight due in?”

It wasn’t due for hours.

“I like to come here early,” the Habs fan explained. He enjoyed browsing the bookstore, eating a burger and watching the world swirl by.

Will suddenly launched into a story about Japan, meditations on suffering and a brewery epiphany.

Years ago, he said, he’d been working in the Japanese “water business” – those curious places where Western women make lots of money talking to Japanese men. Will played the guitar to fill in the silences.

“All they wanted to hear was John Denver, which was pretty horrifying,” he griped.

One day, the bar owner asked him if he’d done meditation. He hadn’t. He took Will to a Shinto Buddhist monastery and started him on a 15-hour session. Sitting in a box. Cross-legged.

“I thought, what the hell, I’ll try it,” Will told Dave. “I asked the abbot: ‘As a Westerner with no experience with meditation, is there anything I can expect to gain from this practice?’

“He said: ‘That’s your problem.’”

Undaunted, Will – not an athletic man, not even all those years ago – folded himself into a lotus position in the box.

Four minutes later, he was silently screaming in agony.

56 minutes later, the monks rang a bell, giving Will much-needed relief.

“The first two hours were pretty good. I liked this whole idea of just trying to shut down and relax, especially as I was evaluating a lot of what was going on in my life and my music career.”

He turned to face Dave.

“You don’t go to Japan because you’re doing well in the US market. You go there because you get work.”

It wasn’t until Hour 3 that Will successfully achieved the full lotus position. By Hour 4, he was going crazy. His legs felt like they were being pushed through a garbarator.

“Instead of meditating about the things I was trying to concentrate on, I ended up just sitting there meditating on: ‘Ring the bell. Ring the effing bell.’ I was getting so sore from being trapped in that box.”

Hours 5, 6, 7 … ring that effing bell was his mantra. It was all he thought about. He had Zen clarity on that point.

“I couldn’t believe I made it. I was completely exhausted – it was very late at night,” he said of the end of Hour 15.

They had a terrible meal for the meditators, a soup that tasted like squash spiked with red radish. Will stared at it.

“Do you not like your soup?” the abbot asked.

“No, the soup is fine. I’m just contemplating the fact that I asked you if I’d get anything out of this,” Will said earnestly. “I really do feel that I got something out of it.”

“That’s your problem,” the abbot replied curtly.

Will was offended, but opted for a respectful silence.

30 years later, Will was awake in the middle of the night watching TV when a ‘help this starving child’ ad came on.

Later, on his backshift at the brewery, he was overwhelmed.

“I never did well on the back shift. Around 4 in the morning, I used to get pretty emotionally weird. Not that I’m not weird on my own. It just got worse,” he explained.

A terrible sadness crushed him and the haunting eyes of the child pressed into him.

And suddenly he understood what the abbot meant: “That’s your problem.”

“I know what it’s like to sit in that box, with your legs just screaming, just burning, and thinking: ring the effing bell, ring that effing bell, ring that effing bell.”

So Will picked up the phone and rang that effing bell to help the kid.

Peter is probably the only chaplain who funds his ministry by selling knives. Lighters and scissors, too. Ipods and digital cameras likewise bring in some cash.

Dave discovered this as Peter pushed a cart of cardboard boxes past him. Dave was fading, spiraling downward on a coffee crash, but the sight of the knife-selling chaplain perked him up.

Peter explained no one paid for a chapel and chaplain at the airport, so he had to fundraise for the position. The airport donated all of the unclaimed confiscated items, plus the lost and found, to the chapel. The annual Christmas auction was just wrapping up – hence the boxes.

“It really brings people together,” Peter smiled, “and we generate income for the chapel.”

He was dressed casually – jeans and a button-up shirt. No dog collar for him.

Dave had seen him before, during his previous nine Christmases at the Airport, but hadn’t spoken to him. That was odd, as Peter was a sort of spiritual Batman, responding to emergencies when the authorities called, and Dave was in a perpetual state of emergency.

“It’s walking the walk with people – hearing their stories and being part of their life. Just listening,” Peter said of his work. “It’s a really interesting place. You’re immersed in it.”

Dave was considering a career change, until Peter spoke over his shoulder as he continued on his way: “It’s always good when you’re not needed.”

Dave’s intestines wrenched. He put down his pen.

It was late. Most of the shops were shuttered. The birds had stopped chirping. Half a dozen people lounged in the lobby, waiting on a few late-night flights from the west.

Dave was not doing well. The old fear was coming back. He’d long known about the Big Bang – the universe being created in a monstrous explosion from a miniscule singularity – but his recent discovery of the Big Rip had unnerved him.

The problem was that the universe was too light. If it were heavier, the Bang would eventually run out of steam and gravity would win the day, pulling the cosmos back in on itself. Time would run backwards, so that everybody would relive every moment of their lives, in reverse. Ditto for the dinosaurs and what came before them.

That pleased Dave – it suggested life meant something. Why else do it twice?

But then he discovered the Big Rip.

This theory holds that the insubstantial universe will keep exploding outwards until it spreads itself so thin that the fabric of the cosmos is ripped to shreds. One day, frozen, unlit space will be all that remains of everything.

Dave felt a chill. He wandered back to the observation window and curled up on the bench. He watched the snow bury everything.

Dave rolled over, throwing his arm over his eyes to block out the ever-daylight brightness of the airport. It had been a rough night. Once the last flights had landed and departed, he had the airport to himself. The bench facing the tarmac windows was long enough to curl up on, but sleep didn’t come. Airports, like hospitals, are always awake.

Drifting past 4am, his thoughts drifted back to Will, and his mid-night brewery epiphany. A line from a Philip Larkin poem about the ‘soundless dark’ of 4am echoed through his head: ‘This is a special way of being afraid/no tricks dispel.’

His passed a long night jotting down thoughts, composing poems and dreaming up stories about the people he’d seen that day, but hadn’t talked to. Their voices took the edge off the night.

He was relieved when the first suitcase wheels hit the ground just after 6 a.m. Families arrived to meet flights, flights took off, and the perpetual motion machine swung back into action. Soon, sunlight repainted the illusion of sky.

He was hours away from his own flight. Going home – though that seemed a funny thing to call it after so long away. He had aging parents, a remote brother and a few long-expired friendships from university. He had joined Facebook to snoop around on his home town and discovered his university girlfriend. Her profile was locked down, but she was alone in her picture. Dave knew it didn’t mean she was single – or even that those ashes could spark – but it seemed like something.

He hauled himself off his makeshift bed and crawled to the coffee shop for his morning drink.

Dave took a seat in the aisle by the check-in gates, watching the mid-morning rush. There wasn’t much of a crowd – winter was slowing travel across the country.

An Egyptian man in his 50s walked past, turned, walked back and sat down.

“You’re a writer?” he said.

Dave set down his pen and nodded.

“So am I,” the man said. “Malak.”

They shook hands.

Sat silently as four flight attendants walked past pushing four empty wheelchairs.

“Where are you off to?” Dave asked.

A daytrip to Mississauga. Five years ago, Malak had put a down payment on a house on Mississauga, expecting to move there from Newfoundland with his two teenagers.

The world didn’t function properly for him and it took five years to get the place built. In the meantime, he moved his family to Halifax so his children could attend the universities. His daughter graduated from high school and caught a plane to the UK to study medicine. His son was in Grade 11 and heading in the same direction.

“If he decides to go to the UK as well, then I would have nothing to do here, so I can go anywhere.”

Then he got a call: the house is ready!

Living in Mississauga no longer seemed necessary, but he was flying out to have a look at the house and see how it felt.

“I don’t need the house anymore,” he mused. “That’s a difficult decision.”

Malak’s life had been a series of positionings, trying to get the best angle on the world. He was born in Egypt, but life as a minority Christian was not pleasant. He figured his kids would leave eventually, so he pre-empted an empty nest by moving the family tree to Canada.

Now that it was emptying anyway, he found himself unconnected to any land. If he was able to live anywhere in the world, why not Mississauga?

In the meantime, he was writing short stories about a Jewish prostitute. Everyone knew her, and knew how she made her scandalous living, and so when a reputed holy man stopped by, her neighbours made sure she was hidden.

The local religious leader had doubts about the alleged holy man and planned to meet him to settle the question of his sanctity. But the prostitute had heard about the visit, and knew about the man – rumour was, he’d saved a friend of hers from a mob attack.

The prostitute wanted to thank him. So, as the local leader probed the visiting allegedly holy man, she burst in, ran to him and fell at his feet crying. She had planned to speak, but emotions got the better of her.

The local leader was scandalized and ordered her ejected. The visitor embraced the woman and defended her.

They both got rejected and ejected, the prostitute and the allegedly holy man bundled out the door together.

The visitor: Jesus Christ.

It’s an old biblical story, but Malak changed the camera’s point of view so that we see the story from the woman’s eyes.

“I like it,” he told Dave. “I usually like to see it from another point of view. From the prostitute’s point of view. How did she feel after that? What changed in her life after that?”

Maybe she gave up her life and got herself to a nunnery. Maybe she went back to work.

Malak wanted to find out.

Dave passed the noon hour eavesdropping on a steady stream of bellyaching about the boggling security measures in airports.

“It doesn’t bother me a bit,” said the man next to him.

“How come?”

Sean told him when he was four, he and his family boarded a flight in Wabush, Labrador, to spend Christmas with family in Ontario. So did another man.

That man was holding a shotgun.

“I don’t know where he’s going to put that,” Sean’s mother wondered. “That’s just going to be in somebody’s way.”

It was 1972. People carried shotguns onto airplanes in 1972. Shortly before they were to take off, the man stuck his rifle under the chin of a flight attendant.

People didn’t do that in 1972.

“Close the doors and take off!” he shouted.

They closed the doors and the plane took off – with 56 passengers.

It flew to Montreal, where the crew convinced the hijacker to let the passengers off. The first person had to walk past the pile of coats at the front of the plane, grab one, and walk all the way off the tarmac before the next person was freed.

Sean and his family got on with Christmas. They’d lost all of their presents in the kafuffle and so everybody got new ones. Sean’s brother got a plastic rifle.

He wasn’t allowed to take it on the plane.

“Now, I just sit in the aisle and I don’t care what they do for security,” Sean laughed.

“So I guess that’s the very moment airport security was born in Canada,” Dave suggested.

Sean nodded.

Sean didn’t hear the rest of the story for more than 30 years. Searching online, he found the flight attendant who had had the rifle stuck in her chin. She’d since moved to Houston and now worked in PR – at an airport.

She filled Sean in. After the passengers were freed, the plane took off. The crew convinced the hijacker they needed to refuel. When they landed, the RCMP were waiting – along with the man’s father and a priest. They talked him off the airplane and he handed in his weapon.

He got more than two decades in prison for 56 counts of aggravated assault, since there weren’t laws against hijacking back then.

Dave’s flight was called. Please proceed to gate seven.

Dave froze. He stared at the blank page on his notebook. The white paper was as blank as a baby’s mind. His heart shook.

He pulled in a lungful of air, let it out through his mouth. If you want to be reborn, your old life must first die.

Dave stood.

His legs trembled. He clutched the notebook. Sunlight streamed in.

Final call for flight.

Dave set his teeth together, turned left, walked toward the check-in gate. Stomach wrenched, stopping him.

He forced himself to open his notebook. Wrote it down.

Another step.

Another note.

Another step.

Another note.

Check-in.

“And where are you heading today, sir?”

“Home.”

-30-