Strangers on a plane

Editor's note: Here's a non-sports blog that I intended to post over the weekend but did not. The "maybe the coolest sports moment of my life" blog is coming at some point soon.

So I had this moment on an airplane. I was sitting in the front row window seat, bulkhead, when I noticed that there was this mother next to me with her two young children. She was trying to calm down the younger one; he was probably 2. He was giving her the look I’ve seen plenty of times with my own 2-year-old. He was not happy.

It amazes me now, looking back, how oblivious I would have been to this scene five or six years ago. I guess I always saw myself as someone who liked kids, the goofy friend of Dad’s who could juggle or make a quarter disappear and then pull it out of your ear. But it really does change when you have kids of your own; you are simply more attuned to that world, to the tenuous moods, to the extreme inconveniences, to the small kindnesses. You notice everything.

A few weeks ago, for instance, the Royals had to cancel their Fourth of July fireworks spectacular for technical reasons. Well, I got dozens of emails from angry fans who had waited all night with their kids for the show. I’m sure that a few years ago, I would have appreciated their anger, but it would not have moved me much. But now, having spent the THIRD of July chasing around my two daughters for three-plus hours just so they could see the fireworks show, well, I can tell you that if they had canceled that show I would have been looking for a lawyer.

ANYWAY, back to the plane, a man came up and tried to settle down the boy. It became apparent he was the father. He was talking to the boy, mussing his hair, holding him close, all those Dad things. Again, I may not have even noticed before, but I turned to him and said, “Excuse me, are you all together?”

“Yes,” he said. He did not seem to want to look at me.

“Well, you guys should be flying together. Where are you sitting?”

“Oh, you don’t want to do that,” he said. “I’m in a middle seat in the back.”

This was a pretty long flight – Milwaukee to San Francisco. I’m not trying to make myself into a hero here because, dammit, I really didn’t want to go back to some middle seat. In fact, I had stood in line to switch out of a middle seat in the first place. But what are you going to do? Separate a family on a four-hour flight? Come on. So I said, “Oh, that’s OK, I’ll go back.”

Well, you would have thought I had given this man my very own canteen in the Sahara. He was beyond thankful. He was – well, what’s a good word for “beyond thankful?” He was Bethankful. I honestly thought he was going to cry. He had not even considered asking me to move back numerous rows to sit in a middle seat … and I had volunteered. More than that, I had done it over his objections. Hey, I’m a good guy! It was as if I had given him reason to believe in mankind again. And for that moment walking back to the middle seat, I was the hero of the plane. People were slapping me on the back. The stewardesses offered me free drinks. I was Gandhi in India. I was Patton in Paris.

Of course, it did suck to sit in the middle seat. My good intentions didn’t prevent the idiot in front of me from reclining his seat all the way back into my spleen.

When the plane landed, I walked off and a different guy walked over to me.

He said: “You should be glad that you switched out of that seat. That kid was screaming the whole flight.”