“Uh, it’s so much better here!”, I though as we got inside, away from cold, into a warm lobby at the ‘Stanford Inn’. A few minutes passed before I had entirely shaken off some ’stiffness in body parts’ acquired during a brief but overwhelming exposure to ‘minus 38 C’ outside, and started relaxing. As my crew mates were checking in at the front desk, I filled leisure minutes by casual observation of the hotel’s interior.
“Uh-uh”, I uttered softly in a mild surprise as my look slowly focused at this picture, “Isn’t it the city of Grand Prairie (the place where we were now), that is ‘all-Canada famous’ for having polar bears roaming the streets?”, a line of thinking flashed across my mind, and even began to form into an awkward joke. “No, that must be valid for Churchill, Manitoba. Not all the cold places are in fact the polar bears’ habitats. Even in Canada”.
However, once cranked up, this kind of associative thinking kept going, until it stumbled upon something, that began signaling from the depth of the memory, yet elusive, but it didn’t take too long before I could recall ‘what that was all about’: “Greg!”
It’s very interesting how this thing works, that associative memory thing, an intricate mental instrument, an irony of having which is that there’s only a ‘limited access’ granted to its ‘owner and operator’, and it is often capable of doing a variety of tricks and jokes on its unsuspecting master. And that’s how it worked in my case.
A couple of months ago Greg called me to ask if his famous albums were still ‘doing OK’ at my place 
By that time I had been retaining them for almost a year. Sure, they were OK, all pictures from them were accurately retrieved, scanned, and put back in to their places. So, we had a quick chitchat, in the end of that I invited Greg and his wife Laurie to come and visit us at our place. We arranged the time, and that was it.
Greg and Laurie came on the slated evening, we had a drink, and a round of ’small talk’, and then we went to the table. One particular salad on the table, after ‘a successful trail by Greg’ on his previous visit a year ago (when he brought over those albums) was repeated; besides, there were other dishes from what would be called ‘our in-house version of classic Russian Menu’ - all for ’sampling’ by our guests. Everything was awesome, and it seemed, Greg and Laurie sincerely enjoyed the task of ’sampling’
Casually, I asked Greg if he’d already seen his schedule for the coming month. He said “No”, and I couldn’t help but amused myself, watching his reaction when I announced that we would be flying together, - no later than in a week after this get-together at the dinner table Of course, It was pure coincidence, for nobody of us would’ve been able to ’set up’ this intentionally.
After that evening, on a scheduled day, we met with Greg again for flying a five-day pairing. However, there was one more ‘turn of surprise’ upon me: after having flown with Greg for one day only, I was switched to work with another crew, apparently to fill in some sort of ‘crew-sched emergency’. Oh, well, that was a kind of thing perfectly reflecting the ‘relative unpredictability’ ingrained into the nature of our trade.
But you can imagine, how loudly we were laughing, when we found each other in the same cockpit one more time, and quite shortly after this episode of schedule switching! In less than a month we were paired to work for four days again! What a string of ‘coincidences’.. As if devised in the very beginning by some ‘higher power’, it was managed in a way of cycle: although interrupted, but definitely wanted to be accomplished ..
I really appreciate Greg’s involvement into this web-project of mine, and his willingness to do ’some stuff’ for it. On that evening at our place I asked him if he could write short comments for a few photographs from his albums, and we would post it as a story from the ‘Greg’s Files’ docket. Sure, he didn’t mind, and it was up to me then, what pictures to choose from the wealth of imagery contained in the albums. First, I had an idea about posting an account of his skiing tour to a site of the DC-6 crash-landing, that occurred in Antarctica in 1993.
Then, for some unclear reason I changed my mind, and decided to ask Greg to give comments for a set of four photographs taken on rather opposite ‘top of the World’ - in Arctic.
Something prompted me to opt for ‘polar bears’ as to the post’s topic. Maybe, it was for a bowl topped up with Russian candies called ‘Mishka na Severe‘, ‘Mishka (the Bear) on the North‘, which we had at home around that time (again, - by pure coincidence!) to treat our guests
And close to a DC-6 photograph in a folder with images scanned from Greg’s albums was a series of pictures taken in Arctic, with a polar bear on one of them.
Here we go! Under impression left by seeing the bear in the lobby, I went to my room, pulled out my Mac, browsed through the received e-mails, found a letter from Greg with his comments on this, and other photos in the batch, and started working on the post.
So, you can see the next: ‘Excerpts from Arctic Chapter of Greg’s files‘
Recent Comments