The Kindness of a Stranger.

I was coming home from a training session in Houston a couple months ago (just days ahead of Ike; dodged that bullet). When I arrived at the departure gate at IAH, there was a woman in the waiting area with five kids, and what looked to be a sixth on the way. There were, of course, many other passengers, but none were quite as, shall we say, prominent as this family. The children were behaving as children do. Not particularly rambunctious, but not sitting still and minding their own business. The woman, on the other hand, was behaving as a pregnant mother might be expected to behave when travelling on her own with five children, not one of whom looked over 10. She was actually louder than the children.

"One guess as to who they end up sitting behind," I commented to myself. I seem to be a children-on-airplanes magnet, in that I always end up with a small child behind me. Not that I'm complaining, mind you; I would rather they are seated behind me than behind another passenger. I'm far too patient and non-confrontational to angrily confront the parent.

So when the plane finally boarded, I was seated in the second-to-last row, port side, and sure enough the family was seated in the last row, starboard. There was a problem, however, with their tickets. As the flight attendants were helping the family to their seats, they noticed that the airline had only sold the family four tickets: one for the mother, and three for the three eldest children. The two youngest were small enough to sit on a lap, but the mother was only allowed to have one child on her lap, and none of the other children were old enough to have a child in their laps. Safety regulations did not permit two children to share a seat. The flight attendants and the mother were just starting to get anxious, trying to figure out how to seat this family, when the gentleman in the row behind me, just next to the family's seats, spoke up.

"He can sit in my lap," he said of the second-youngest child, the one that had no lap and no seat.

He was a younger gentleman, probably in his early thirties or late twenties. He had a goatee and a kindly face. I assume he was from Texas, because of his looks, his slight drawl, the fact that we were leaving from Houston, and the fact that no one in LA would ever offer that sort of kindness to a stranger.

It was a couple hours from Houston to Denver, and the gentleman kept the young boy entertained the entire way. It was Frontier airlines, so each seat had DirecTV in the back of the seat, but unlike JetBlue, you have to pay for it. The flight attendants offered the service for free to this family, and the man watched cartoons with the boy for most of the flight. The boy was very inquisitive, and the man talked with the boy, answered his questions, and made sure the mother only had to worry about corraling four of her children through the flight.

And there was nothing weird about it. Nothing stalker-ish, or paedophiliac in his manners or mood.

I found myself quite moved by this simple act of Christian charity. No one in Orange County would ever do such a thing for a random stranger. We're all too busy rushing to work, trying to beat the traffic, drinking our Starbucks soy lattés, and thinking about ourselves to be any sort of concerned about those around us.

After the flight arrived in Denver, as the passengers debarked, one of the flight attendants turned to the man and said, "you're a saint."

How right she was.

"And the king answering shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me."