Another bloody birthday

Another bloody birthday

(For Susan’s Fiftieth)

Out of all the great people, who worked at Horizon Airlines, Susan Sturges was the one I usually felt closest to. During the six years we worked together, I found Susan to be an excellent troubleshooter and a reliable friend. She quickly learned how to cut straight through the B.S., bringing her own special recipe of effective empowerment into play. In fact, Susan brought a high level of excellence into everything she did; for instance, she often brought some extra pizzazz to customers, who were waiting in the droll ticket line, by sparking up brief conversations, and unless they were acting like jackasses, gained a little respectful smile from them. Susan is a person blessed with real owl medicine.

One late autumn slack day, while we were working together in the flight operations room, we discovered that we both had the same birthday. We had already felt as though we were kindred spirits, but this became especially symbolic for us. As now marks another anniversary of our birthdays, here is a story to go along with it:

Around nine years ago or so, we stayed up late to celebrate another birthday together, but both of us had to be in at work early the next morning. The cloud ceiling was low, which meant we were bussing, so we came in around 4:30 a.m. Susan arrived before I. She was standing over where they used to allow the employees park before 9-11, right next to the aircraft de-icing machine. I saw her gazing up at the starry sky and wondered if there was something in particular she found interesting. As I approached, I could smell vodka still emanating from the night before. I knew this to be a fact, because rum was still seeping out from me.

So we walked into Friedman together, feeling no pain. That is until we opened up the door to the garage and saw two cartloads of luggage, which had arrived from the late bus. Among the bumped skis and bags were two boxes of blood, which were to be delivered to the old Hailey Wood River Medical Center. Problem is that one of the boxes of blood was actually meant for Orofino’s hospital. It had been misloaded in Boise, so now we had to resend it.

For a moment we could feel that older year upon us.

After making a fitting joke about whoever misloaded the box must have drank too many bloody Marys, we held the blood in the warmer operations room, until bus departure time. As I hoisted the blood carefully onto the loading cart, I saw that my salt of the earth Susan had labeled the box, Please expedite to the Orofino ‘Hostital’

I lightly chuckled and found my pain was again subsiding due to the bloody joke. I never said much about the incident, but thought that I should save it for a special occasion…

…And the moral of the story is, “Be careful about overcelebrating significant birthdays, because your blood could unexpectedly show up at the wrong hostital.