Finding Unexpected Community and Celebration on an Airplane: A True Story

Returning home is probably the least exciting part of anyone’s trip. 

Yet my last flight truly surprised me. 

Allow me to set the scene: I’d just finished a 10-day trip to Quebec and eastern Canada, complete with a 7-day cruise—and it was my birthday.

I was traveling with my mom and two of her friends, all of whom took every opportunity to tell people it was my birthday week during the trip, earning me not one but two different birthday cakes and a peach bellini. Having woken up at 4:30 a.m. to watch our ship sail past the Statue of Liberty in New York, I was bleary-eyed and tired, ready to get back home and sleep in my own bed.

I’d thought the birthday celebrations were behind me, that the number 26 had been more than dutifully celebrated, and that it was time to move on. 

Yet midway through the small Delta flight from LaGuardia to Milwaukee, the flight attendant came on the PA system to make a short announcement.

Her announcement, you wonder? 

That it was my birthday! 

I could feel my face flush with a mixture of embarrassment and joy—my fellow passengers started clapping—and then the two businessmen from Luxembourg sitting across from us began singing the Happy Birthday song, and the others joined in. 

So here I was, buckled into my plane seat, listening to my fellow passengers, most of whom I couldn’t see and never would, once we left the air, sing a song celebrating the day of my birth. 

It’s a rare thing, isn’t it? To experience community and celebration onboard an airplane full of strangers.

As a travel journalist, I more often hear of aircraft mechanical failures and angry, violent passengers ruining a flight rather than simple acts of kindness like the one I experienced.

I’ll never know who in my travel party asked the flight attendant to make the announcement (they, like a coven of witches, have sworn themselves to secrecy), but whoever it was, I am grateful. 

Because of them, I got to witness an incredible act of community from a plane full of strangers. Who wouldn’t feel happier growing older when you have so many people celebrating the day of your birth? 

It seems a simple thing, but it matters. It reminded me that everyone is worth celebrating, worth cherishing, even if they’re strangers who’ve only entered my life for a two-and-a-half-hour flight—people whose lives only intersect with mine for a short moment before once again veering off into the vast beyond that is human existence outside the realm of myself. 

So for anyone on that small plane heading to Milwaukee that day—you know who you are—thanks for making my day so special, and for celebrating with me. 

I hope I’ll be able to do the same for somebody else someday soon. 

In fact, let’s all look at our fellow humans, strangers or not, with a little more kindness. We all deserve to experience moments of community, and they come so rarely. 

If we choose to be ready to do something as simple as singing the Happy Birthday song for a stranger—well, then we’re already halfway there to creating that community, aren’t we? 

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