So I was just reading a story about somebody on a long flight with a screaming baby and how she was treated, and it made me think of how I had the opposite experience.

I’ve got pretty bad anxiety in general and Covid made it a lot worse, so while my husband and I have always loved traveling, we haven’t really gone anywhere since we started having kids. Last summer we started traveling again and I was so tense about it. We had our 3 kids (at the time ranging from 2 to 11 years old) and had to do kind of a complicated overnight long-haul flight with layovers.

We were seated on one side of the plane such that I was in one row with 2 kids, my husband was behind me with the other kid, and one poor stranger got to sit behind us too. I felt really bad because the kids were constantly shuffling seats and digging through bags and being just a tiny bit obnoxious (like, not fussing or yelling, but they don’t have any travel experience and are still learning how to behave on planes etc).

Anyway, I’m just whole-body cringing, but this nice man stuck with us strikes up a convo with my husband and they’re getting on like a house on fire, he even buys him a drink and they’re chatting away.

After awhile everyone quiets down and goes to sleep. 2/3 of the way through, my daughter wakes up, and before I can even ask her if she’s ok, she throws up EVERYWHERE. It was SO gross, and she was crying, and we were being a big loud awful disturbance while people were trying to sleep. The flight attendants, bless them, brought me gloves and disinfectant and garbage bags, and I got my daughter cleaned up in the bathroom and then stuffed her into the row behind while I dry-heaved my way through cleaning the mess. It had to have taken at least half an hour, and it did not smell good.

At some point I noticed the gentleman had (rightfully, I thought) disappeared, and I hoped the flight attendant had found another seat for him. Finally I collapsed back into my well-scrubbed seat, trying to recover from my full-body sweat, and got the kids back to sleep. And *the dude came back*. He had just been walking laps to give us some space, all that time. It was like 3am in a dark plane. I apologized (groveled) and felt terrible, but he just very cheerfully said not to worry about it, he completely understands, not to give it another thought.

It was just so kind and considerate of him, and he had every reason to loathe us. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how nice of him that was. I wish I had a way to tell him how much I appreciated it. If anyone knows an unbelievably tolerant middle-aged man who had a similar experience last summer on a Norse air flight from Paris to NYC, please tell him thank you!