January 15, 2015 (Thursday)
Cris O’Leary made the news yesterday by being the one and only passenger on a Delta flight from Cleveland to New York. The captain welcomed him aboard personally. He tweeted a picture of himself with all the empty seats behind him.
His experience mirrored my own in 1967 when I was the lone passenger on a flight from Taipei to Hong Kong. My experience, I believe, was better because all the flight attendants moved me to a huge leather reclining chair in First Class, where they joined me in similar chairs of their own. They literally kicked off their shoes and we had a nice visit together on the flight of about an hour, if I remember correctly. My memory is shaky about it all, but I think it was Malaysian Air Lines.
My earlier flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo had also been quite interesting, because the man sitting next to me was a Japanese business man, Hasime Onishi, who had flown a special surrender plane to Manilla for unconditional surrender negotiations at the end of World War 2. When I arrived later back in Rockport, a local man gave me a picture of the plane and crew and the dignitaries made when they refueled in Okinawa. I sent the picture to Mister Onishi, and he wrote me that the picture had aroused all kinds of questions from his teen-age son, who evidently did not know about his father’s experience.
To sort of quote Forrest Gump, “Flying is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.” In fact, our entire life is like that–full of surprises, many of them experiences of joy. There is a word for that: “Serendipity” (surprised by joy).
In an era filled with so much bad news, the serendipitous experience is received with thanksgiving. Have you been surprised by joy lately? No doubt you can remember more than one such experience in your life. I love the quotation from Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.” Look for the good and you will find it.