Cross-Country Flight Baby Wails: Unexpected Joy and Tears
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The community Baby: A Flight to Remember
Why We Wrote This
What happens when a crying baby reigns over a long flight? The community pulls together. Our essayist offers a heartwarming reminder that trying circumstances can bring out the best in all of us.
Air travel is not my best thing. It isn’t even down the hall from my best thing. I have shown up at the airport at the right time, but on the wrong day. I once missed a connecting flight during a five-hour layover by falling asleep at a gate in the wrong terminal. I am certain I am capable of showing up for an international flight without a passport.I have earned my trepidation.
I might have sworn off flying altogether if it hadn’t been for the Community Baby.
That trip was auspicious from the get-go. It wasn’t in the way-olden days, when you could show up and buy a ticket five minutes before departure, and thay served steak, and you had room to tuck a golden retriever between your knees and the next seat up. But it did predate the pandemic, and you could still get a free packet of peanuts.
As I wedged my way down the aisle,I noticed a small sign printed under the window that said,”Seats in this row do not recline.” I chose to see this as a directive to adjust my attitude and sat up in mandatory primness, imagining that all the other rows said, “Seats in this row do not recline all that much.” It helped.
The flight was fine, the pilots hit the ground with the restraint they get the big bucks for, and I was in a good state of mind for the return trip. I arrived at the correct gate in plenty of time to take my required three walks to the counter to make sure it was still the correct gate.
That’s when a man came up and said he had been talking to someone – he pointed toward an old woman visibly trembling behind a massive baby stroller – who had never flown before, let alone with an infant, and could use some help.
The counter people peeled out and began to speak to her with kind voices, one shouldering the baby and the other folding up the stroller and seeing it to the plane. The old woman was rigid and mute with terror. Neither English nor calm seemed to be her first language.
Babies make me a little uncomfortable. I didn’t care for dolls when I was little. And my husband, Dave, and I never had children; we reasoned there was too great a risk they