Last week I went to the neighborhood bar hoping to catch a hockey game. The bar is near the airport and when I got there, the big screen was playing The History Channel - that's what it said - and that's what I gasped aloud, feeling kinda pissed, and then several tablefulls of silent men turned to me, and one said "We're aviation junkies." The show was called something like Northern Ice Pilots and seemed to focus on a bunch of cargo stuck somewhere in nowheres NWT, while people got angry somewhere else and made a lot of irate phone calls. The men were rapt, and chuckled in unison when the dispatcher yelled down the phone and the mechanic tried to spin a frozen propeller. We drank our beer and I ate a club sandwich and watched them watching.
I met someone new at work. One time I told her I'd slept poorly and she said she had too, but it was okay, she just got up and went on the computer to "check on her animals". She said she follows a whole bunch of animals on webcams around the world. She told me she's an elephant person, but lately she's been into checking up on a whole bunch of baby pandas. All those tiny pandas and their video cameras. This week I heard someone ask her about her weekend and she said she'd done "nothing much, gassed up at cheap gas."
People's lives. The wonder and variety in the world.
