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The teenager was heading to California, and the man to Oregon. They were not supposed to be on the same flight, but their chance encounter was widely known and celebrated.
The daughter, Clara Daly, 15, and her mother were traveling to Calabasas, California, and planned to fly non-stop from Boston to Los Angeles. Their flight was canceled, so Alaska Airlines booked them on another flight with a stopover in Portland, Oregon.
This is how Clara ended up meeting Tim Cook, 64 years old. Mr. Cook, who is deaf and blind, was not able to easily communicate with flight attendants.
Another passenger, Lynette Scribner, described in a Facebook post what she saw.
"The flight attendants really wanted to help her, but had no way of communicating," she wrote. "I watched as they did not flinch when he reached out to touch their faces and their arms, they took his hand and tried to communicate with him, but to no avail."
Participants asked if anyone aboard knew American sign language. Clara, who had attended sign language classes for a year, pressed the call button.
The attendants asked her to sign letters in Mr. Cook's hand, so she knelt in front of him and began to spell words.
How are you? She asked. "It's okay.?"
They talked a few times during the flight, once for about 30 minutes. She told him where she was going to school and about her grandmother in Boston. He told her about his childhood and his sister, who also lives in Boston.
"It seems like it's such a lonely life to be deaf and blind – not to be able to see and hear," Clara said Sunday.
Ms. Scribner, 56, who was traveling in Seaside, Oregon, and sitting in the same row as Mr. Cook, took a picture of both: Clara looking intently at Mr. Cook's face as she signed into his hands, which were attached around his.
Ms. Scribner said that she had a habit of posting a positive thing on Facebook every day, so she wrote on the pair and attached the photo.
"I do not know when I saw so many people coming together to take care of another human being," she writes. "We were all in the immediate ranks laughing and smiling and enjoying his obvious pleasure of having someone to talk to."
At different times in the conversation, "they both laughed," she said Sunday. "His frustration has been greatly reduced, you could just see him clear up."
A friend asked him to make the message public so that it could be shared and shared. On Sunday afternoon, Ms. Scribner's post had been loved more than a million times and shared nearly 600,000 times.
"I was so impressed by Clara's kindness," said Ms. Scribner. "I think people were hungry for something beautiful."
Clara was in agreement.
"Everyone is disappointed by what is happening in our society," she said, citing shootings in schools, families of separated migrants at the border and global warming. "It's just a bad thing after a bad thing."
Seeing something that brings joy is just rare, she says.
Mr. Cook, who lives in a house for the deaf in Gresham, Oregon, in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, told the TV channel KGW that he had the habit of feeling isolated.
"Helen Keller said deafblind people are the most lonely people in the world," he said. "When I heard that I started crying."
He lost his sight and hearing in adulthood, according to Heather Hunter, spokesperson for Brookdale Senior Living, the company that runs the house where Mr. Cook lives.
"He is just completely shocked that so many people have been so interested in history," she said Sunday.
Mr. Cook told KGW that he was "very moved" that Clara took the time to come and talk to him.
"Maybe that was supposed to be, who knows?" He said.
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