Grasshopper New Media Presents...

I forget what airport it was, but that doesn’t much matter, because airports are more or less interchangeable these days. We had just spent some time in Florida visiting Ben’s great-grandmother and her history-buff husband, and we were on the first leg of our trip home. The airplane was full, too full. Packed in ever so tightly, we were. We had landed, but infuriatingly and illogically, there was no empty gate to accommodate our plane. Had the control tower Dilberts not been expecting us? So there we were, sitting in some unused far-off corner of the tarmac where we would be out of the way, as much as a behemoth metal tube can ever be out of the way.

Everyone on board our idled plane was tired and past angry. It was hot, because the controls had been disengaged, and there was no air circulating. We would have been glad to feel even stale, canned air on our skin. Some of us (my family included) had connections to make, the likelihood that we would be missing those connections increasing every second we remained buckled in our seats. There’s nothing more frustrating than watching one’s connection take off. I know, because there was nothing else to do but watch Very Useful Airplanes (unlike ours) leave the tarmac, one after the other.

Ben, at two and a half, was still too young to understand the irritating chain of events set in motion by a missed connection, so he alone remained a nonplussed passenger. Unlike most two-year-olds, Ben was enchanting not some of the time but all of it. (He wouldn’t start having full-blown temper tantrums until three.) Insanely sociable and good-natured, he had not cried once on the flight. Others had noticed and complimented me and my husband on our parenting skills. We had thanked them, of course, but we knew that we hadn’t had much to do with his good behavior. It has always been a mystery to us that Ben is such a sunny sort. We are not particularly sunny people ourselves.

And then our sunny boy had a sunny idea. While grown-ups were sighing, complaining vociferously (as if the stewards and stewardesses might actually be able to help them), opening and closing seat trays with excessive force, jiggling keys with misplaced fury, and generally acting like asses, Ben started singing. He sang “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” in a clear, lovely, high voice. At the first verse, his father and I indulged him by responding, “Dog!” And off Ben went. At the second verse, a kind older woman sitting in our row offered up, “Pig!” Soon everyone in our row was chiming in with animal names.

This had the effect of energizing Ben, who wriggled out of his seatbelt, stood up in his seat, and sang louder. And do you know what? Within a few minutes, the entire planeload of people was singing along with Ben. I had never seen anything like it before and expect I never will again. Laughing and crying simultaneously, I could only shake my head in amazement.

And why shouldn’t my heart have leapt a little to see a two-year-old so effortlessly derail the annoyance and anger and stress and hostility and worry of so many grown-ups, all with their pressing agendas and preoccupations? It wasn’t even Ben’s intention to provide therapy for his fellow passengers. He simply enjoyed an audience; he still does. He may not have had any goal at all in mind when he started singing, but he ended up carrying the loads of more than one hundred people for at least a few minutes of an ordinary day in March.

If we could only harness the spirits of all the children, who, like Ben, have so much to offer, in order to effect the kind of change that was so marked and magical among a chance group of passengers hailing from parts unknown, bound for parts unknown, we’d really be in business, wouldn’t we?

[tags]kids, parents, travel, airport, airplane, stress, singing, Old McDonald Had a Farm[/tags]
Head-spinning cuteness (above photo) graciously provided by the author, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved