Fly the Friendly Skies

This afternoon I dropped my wife at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport so that she could wing her way to Cleveland, then drive to some town in Ohio with "Village" in its name, though its probably not a village in the strictest sense of the word. Whatever it is, it's where she'll spend Thursday working before soaring back to Minnesota to celebrate my birthday. I no longer enjoy air travel, nor does she, but it's a requirement of her job.

However, if every trip ended as the one she made last week, she probably wouldn't mind travelling quite as much. And what happened was that someone took the time to do a thoughtful thing for her, which was to return the Day Planner to she had left on the plane. If you have any kind of responsible or professional job, you probably know the value one of these magic books. My wife had both personal and professional information in it, and it would've cost her countless hours of gathering data from a range of sources to put it all back together again, if it could've been done at all.

She was close to distraught at such a loss, and our weekend began on a somewhat sour note. But on Sunday, as she was catching up on some of her work on her company computer, the phone rang. A voice asked, "Are you missing something?" She knew immediately. Someone had found her Day Planner, and that someone was a Flight Attendant for United Airlines. I could hear her talking to him somewhat animatedly, and she came out of her workspace with a huge smile. Further, not only did this United employee refuse to accept any reward, he also refused to accept payment for what turned out to be a overnight FedEx shipment.

This is a big deal for at least two reasons: the loss would have nearly shut her work down for a time; and it softened our growing belief that all civility and thougtfullness is lost in today's world. No, it's not lost. It just hides and pops up when we least expect it, sometimes when we need it most. My wife has sent a letter to United Airlines about the good this employee did for her and the good he's done for his employer. Yes, we'll try to fly the friendly skies as often as possible because one good deed deserves several others.