Author: Denise

(Sunday, July 14, 2013)  The sweetest memory from the 2013 Dream Conference was when Bonnie and I went kayaking with the dolphins. The weather was perfect, the sea was gentle and warm. Our guide John told us we were traveling in a pod of about 250 Bottlenose Dolphins: newborn babies, bulls and cows. He told us that if we paddled without striking our oars on the side of the kayak that the pod would come to accept us.

It was true. They started swimming closer and closer, popping up from under the surface to give us one curious eye, then dipping back down beneath the waves. At times they were only five or so feet away from our kayak. John explained that the sea below us was full of dolphins and that we were seeing just a few of them above the water. I am still under their spell.

Our guide, a young Christian pastor, was quite the suitable companion for such a mystical experience. I had the sense, the whole time in Virginia, of being a player in a scene from the film “Brother Where Art Thou.” Everywhere we went folks were god blessing us and wishing us a “blessed day.”

(Sunday, July 14, 2013)  One of the events of the IASD Dream Conference is a guided nature walk. Bonnie, Peter, Pat and I joined the walk to the First Landing State Park, which is a cypress swamp a short distance from the convention hotel.

We all became lost, but Bonnie and Peter’s group realized that fact early on and headed back to the hotel. I was in a separate group of 13 people, including Pat, who did not figure it out till nearly sunset.

Someone in the troupe called the hotel and asked them to send us a shuttle. While this was being negotiated, however, a few others had flagged down a man in an SUV, with a fishing boat in tow, and talked him into taking them out of the woods. There was room for three people in the open boat. Two people were already seated and an extended discussion among The Lost ensued about who the third passenger should be. Finally, the impatient and surly driver stuck his head out of the window of his SUV and informed us he had places to go.

I was worried Pat would miss the opening reception for the art show, so I talked him into hopping into the boat. So away they all went, down the darkening road. Someone then wondered, sardonically, if we would later discover the three dumped in a ditch somewhere.

Finally the shuttle arrived, with Pat and his two boating companions already seated inside. Apparently the surly driver had only taken them to the end of the road, which was about a quarter mile away.

(Saturday, June 29, 2013)  Because of storms along the eastern seaboard, Bonnie and I arrived at Detroit International from Norfolk (and the dream conference) six hours too late for our connecting flight to Minneapolis, at around two in the morning. We had re-booked before we left Norfolk and were scheduled for an 8:30 flight home from Detroit.

Immediately after deplaning, the Delta gate attendant printed off a new ticket that sent me to Reagan Airport in D.C. at noon that day, with just 15 minutes to make my connector back to Minneapolis. The computer had bumped me, but not Bonnie, from the 8:30 flight. I went to another gate for help but the woman there told me all the direct flights back to MSP were “zeroed out.”

I joined the Help queue with a group of young female basketball players and their parents who had been on our Norfolk flight and were desperately trying to get all 18 of them back home to Minneapolis. I think I stood in line at least two hours while Bonnie tried to sleep curled up on the hard floor. The mood all around was of intense frustration, fatigue and disbelief. I had been pretty irritable with one of the Delta employees and was not feeling good about my behavior, so I decided to try to exercise real calm in the middle of chaos, in the middle of the long, crawling line. I focused on keeping my spine supple and my breathing deep. I treated it like a walking meditation and tried to release any expectation of outcome.

When I was finally next in line for assistance, I heard a voice deep with authority ask: “Ma’am, do you need help?” To my right, about 15 feet away, stood a distinguished black gentleman with very erect posture and a small leather attaché case held loosely in his left hand. “Ma’am, do you need help?” he repeated, and then said. “Come with me.”

I followed him around the corner to a computer terminal. He turned out to be the Delta supervisor. He booted up the computer and told me that prior to talking to me he had checked the Minneapolis flights again and had found one, only one, direct flight, departing at 1:30 in the afternoon. He had secured it for me.

This just all felt like a dream! I told him twice that he was my guardian angel. We spent about fifteen minutes together looking through the computer. He said he had forgotten more information than most Delta employees know. Finally, he showed me the schedule of all the direct flights to Minneapolis and got me on the stand-by list for a 7:30 flight. He told me if I missed that flight to get on stand-by for the next flight, and then the next, and then the next. If all else failed, I had the boarding pass for the 1:30 flight.

Even though there were 22 of us on stand-by for that 7:30 flight, including half of the basketball team and a young med student trying to get home from Prague, we all made it on the plane, landing safely in Minneapolis while Bonnie was still in the air.

Day notes:

This experience is a pretty literal version of my dream “Abilene TX.”