While traveling with a newborn may be difficult, parent Rubin Swift never anticipated being stopped at the Frontier Airlines gate in Arizona and told that he and his infant daughter Ru-Andria couldn’t even board the plane.
Rubin discovered that he had a daughter who had just been born in Arizona and that he had been given custody of her.
In order to save his child and bring her home, the 43-year-old father from Cleveland, Ohio, packed his things and left for the south.
In Banner University Medical Center, he met his daughter for the first time and started to become close to her. There, he met Joy Ringhofer, a 78-year-old volunteer in the NICU.
After giving birth, baby Ru-Andria was sent to the NICU for a few days as a precaution.
Joy, who had recently become a widow, knew that Rubin was a loving parent despite being put in an unexpected circumstance.
He has four stepchildren with Tiffany, who was 32 at the time, and three adult children from a previous marriage.
Joy felt driven for some inexplicable reason to write down her number and give it to Rubin, surprising him.
Even on the day of his departure, she volunteered to drive him to the airport.
As it turned out, Rubin required confirmation of Ru-age Andria’s before allowing her to fly with him. According to Frontier Airlines’ rules, a baby must be at least seven days old to fly.
Yet obtaining the required paperwork might take a week!
Rubin was unsure of what to do as he ran into the enormous barrier at the airport. He considered spending days waiting till he could pick up her birth certificate sleeping on the floor of the airport.
“I was out of money and the hospital told me that I wouldn’t be able to get a birth certificate for seven days. I was worried that if security saw me sleeping at the airport with a newborn, they’d take her away from me and charge me with neglect. I was stuck.”
He contacted his wife Tiffany, who was helpless.
Simply put, they lacked the funds for him to get a hotel room and wait it out or rent a car and travel home.
“When he called me from the airport and told me that they weren’t going to let him fly until he could get a birth certificate in four days, I felt panicked … I didn’t want him to sleep at the airport. I was scared because it looked like we were out of options.”
Rubin briefly considered getting in touch with Joy, the NICU volunteer who had gently driven him to the airport and treated him with nothing but kindness.
He had no other choices, so he took a gamble and contacted the elderly person.
After he explained what had happened to her, she insisted on going back to the airport to fetch him and his sweet kid up.
“I told him, ‘I’m going to take you home with me,’ so wait right there. There are a lot of dangers out there, but there’s a lot of good, too. I’d enjoyed talking to Rubin at the hospital and helping him with the baby. He was polite and kind and I could tell that he had a good heart.”
Joy’s eagerness to save him, a stranger, and Ru-Andria from their plight astounded Rubin, a deli owner back in Ohio.
“I’m black and she is white. I’m a stranger who grew up in the projects in the Bronx and she’s a great-grandmother who recently lost her husband. She knew very little about me, and yet, she took me in. Color wasn’t an issue to her. She showed me that in this crazy world, there is still compassion.”
In order to let his wife know how Joy, his angel, had gone above and beyond to assist him, Rubin spoke with her. She was also in amazement. Rubin, who got a great impression of Joy the day he met her, didn’t think twice about accepting Joy’s offer.
“Miss Joy was like an angel and she’d really bonded with Ru-Andria. Whenever my daughter heard her voice, her face would light up. As soon as she took us in, I knew we’d be friends for life.”
During their four days together, the middle-aged father and the elderly widow took care of Ru-Andria and spoke nonstop.
Joy said that she had four kids, seven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren at the time.
They went food shopping, on energizing walks with Ru-Andria, and even paid a visit to Joy’s late husband’s grave.
“I could see the pain in her face from losing her husband, so at the cemetery, as we sat there with the baby, I said, ‘Hey, Charles, look — it’s your new granddaughter.’ We had some touching and wonderful moments. I lost my mom to cancer in 2007, so Joy really became like a mother or grandmother figure to me.”
Rubin and Ru-Andria were eager to return home and visit his wife and kids when the birth certificate was prepared.
Yet he was aware that Joy would be missed. The frequent Skype visits between the two, which they swore to keep up, make Joy’s days happy.
“We just knew that we’d always be in touch from that day forward. We started out as strangers, and ended up as good friends. Rubin is very grateful to me, but I’m also very grateful to have had the opportunity.”
Rubin is aware that Joy might have easily rejected him. Instead, she helped a stranger and his infant out of a terrible position by opening her home and her heart to them.