Clara Daly didn’t think twice.
She was returning from Boston with her mother, Jane, after visiting her grandmother when their flight was canceled and they were rebooked on another plane bound for Los Angeles. That June afternoon in 2018, Tim Cook, a deaf and blind man returning to Portland after visiting his sister, was on the same plane. An hour after takeoff, the flight attendants were having trouble communicating with him and asked over the PA system if any passenger knew sign language.
The one who pressed the call button was a 15-year-old girl from Calabasas who had been studying ASL for only a year. They communicated by forming each letter of each word in Tim’s palm.
“I knelt in the aisle, placed my hands between his, and started asking him, ‘How are you?’, ‘Are you okay?’, ‘Do you need anything?'”, she said. “He told me he needed water, so the flight attendants brought him some”.
She brought him water, let him know the time, and spent the last hour of the flight talking with him about his life and plans. “I went from being in a bad mood to being in a good mood very quickly”, Tim said afterward. A passenger who witnessed the scene shared it on Facebook, and it went viral.
