It was past midnight when we landed in Denver, but the airport was surprisingly full of people for the late hour. Apparently we weren't the only ones stranded in Denver on what was now officially Christmas Eve. We moved through the airport efficiently, and twenty minutes later my wife and I, and her newfound friend Lisa, were standing outside the terminal with our two roller bags and briefcases and a mountain of luggage belonging to Lisa and her husband, Misha, waiting for Misha to bring up the car to take us to their place in Boulder. Since we couldn't get home to San Francisco, Gina and I had agreed to be Lisa and Misha's guests for Christmas at their Boulder condo. It was cold, and the wind was blowing hard. Thank God we weren't waiting upstairs on the departures deck.
Mercifully, Misha showed up promptly, and he and I loaded the bags into the back of a shiny black Hummer while the girls hopped in the back seat. I never cared much for the look of a Hummer, but I was feeling more charitable towards the vehicle as we drove out from under the cover of the departures deck and were hit by a wall of blowing snow. The area around the terminal was well lit, so the visibility wasn't too bad, but I expected things to get worse quickly, and they did. DIA is built out on the plains, well to the east of urban Denver, so when a snowstorm like this one hits, there is nothing to soften the force of the wind.
I could hear the girls giggling in the back seat. After a minute or two Lisa spoke up. "Misha, is this like driving a sleigh in the winter in Siberia, when you were young? It feels like we are in a Russian novel—like Doctor Zhivago."
"No. This Hummer is a lot warmer than a sleigh, but the weather is very similar."
I could detect a Russian accent beneath Misha's cultivated English.
Fifteen minutes later, we were grinding our way up the toll road, E-470, that gets you from DIA to Boulder without having to go through urban Denver. The back seat was silent, as the girls had fallen asleep. The wind was blowing hard from the west, pushing a wall of snow across the headlights. When we turned to the west as we crossed I-76, the snow was blowing straight into our face. Everything to the sides was darkness and the headlights illuminated a white wall before us. We just tried to follow a track made by a snowplow sometime in the last half hour or so.
"Tough ride," I said after about twenty minutes of silence from Misha.
"Lisa's right. I've seen worse. I grew up near Arkhangelsk, the big Russian naval base in Northern Russia. The port may have been ice free, but nothing else was. My father was a naval officer. Submarines."
"It's a small world," I said. "My mother was Swedish, but my father was an American naval officer. I grew up in Trømso, in northern Norway, where the Americans listened to your father as he drove his submarine out into the North Atlantic, but that's all history," I said.
"Do you miss Scandinavia?" he asked, changing the subject somewhat.
"Hah. What's to miss? Lutefisk and Aquavit? Ice and snow?" I laughed. "When my father was recalled to duty at the Pentagon, I finished high school in Virginia and then went to Stanford for college and stayed for law school. California is just fine with me."
"Tell me that you at least miss the Norwegian blondes?" he asked.
"California has plenty of blondes," I responded. "You know what the Beach Boys had to say about that." In case he didn't immediately get the reference, I whistled a few bars from California Girls.
He laughed.
"How about you?" I asked. "How did you get out of Arkhangelsk?"
"Well, by the time I was finishing high school, the Soviet Union was falling apart, literally. I had an uncle who was, how do you say in English, an oligarch. Not a gangster, just a very successful businessman, although I must say, I had some doubts about some of his associates. Apparently he did too, because he used some of his money to get me, and the rest of my family, to Paris. I tried college, but I wasn't very good at it—too busy chasing French girls and drinking French wine, I think. Eventually, my father and my uncle explained that I better find a useful skill. My uncle can be very persuasive, you understand, so for no particularly good reason, I chose to go to the cooking school at Cordon Bleu."
"So you learned to cook?"
"Yes, I learned to cook, and it's something I still enjoy doing at home. More importantly, I learned to run a restaurant. Now I own five of them, including one in New York, where we live most of the time, and one here in Boulder. I haven't cooked in a restaurant kitchen in five years."
"And Lisa, did she come from Russia too?"
"God no," he laughed. "She was born and raised in Connecticut. I think her family arrived in America with the pilgrims. She is as close as America comes to a blue blood, without being named Kennedy. I met her when I opened my first restaurant in New York. Now we've sold the restaurants in Paris and London, and we just own the ones I started in the States."
Just then the road veered a bit to the north, and we caught a blast of wind that wanted to push us off the side of the road. God, it was a damnable night out.
We finally rolled into Boulder about 3:00 a.m. Their condo was on the third and fourth floors of a building in the heart of Boulder, near its commercial center. It took awhile to haul their mountain of luggage up to the third floor and, by the time I got to our room, Gina was in bed and sound asleep. I shucked off my clothes and joined her. She felt so warm as I spooned against her naked back, and then I quickly drifted off to sleep. The next thing I knew, it was late morning, and Gina was gone. She always rose before me unless our wake-up was being dictated by the tyranny of an airplane departure schedule.
It was warm beneath the down comforter, and I wasn't in any particular hurry to rise, especially since a glance out the window to my left told me that it was still snowing hard outside. "Yep, it is going to be a White Christmas," I thought. But after a few minutes, I decided that sleep was done for the night, so I stretched my lanky frame and then tossed off the blanket. There was a bath to my left, that, it turned out, had a luxurious shower that quickly killed the chill that came from crawling naked from beneath the down comforter.
I shaved and dressed in a pair of jeans and old Stanford T-shirt I had in my carry-on. Then I walked barefoot down the stairs and into the main part of the condo.
It was what designers call a great room I guess—kind of like a Soho loft, but with floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. One side looked to the northeast towards the plains. It was more or less a wall of white, unless you looked down at the town three stories below us. Even much of that shifted in and out of focus as the snow swirled by. The view to the southwest was of a piece of the Front Range known to the locals as the Flatirons—a series of steep parallel rock faces that jutted up from the earth at an angle about fifteen to twenty degrees off vertical. The swirling snow made them look a little like an impressionist painting.
In front of the window facing the Flatirons there was a long, rough, farmhouse style table that could probably seat at least twelve. The room included a large fireplace in which a wood fire burned merrily. The floor was wood planking of some exotic species (teak, I wondered?) covered with thick throw rugs here and there, including a large one immediately before the fireplace. There were a couple of couches and several armchairs strategically scattered about the room. There wasn't a lot of room for artwork, but on each side of the fireplace there was a nice tapestry. They were abstracts in muted colors and soft yarns that did not distract from the rest of the room and the view.
What really grabbed my attention was on the back side of the room. There I found an extremely well-appointed kitchen, with pots and pans hanging from an overhead rack, a variety of knives glued to a magnetic rack and an oversized refrigerator. The pots and pans were clean but showed stains from regular use. There was an island with a large food prep area, including a butcher block and a professional grade gas range and oven with a hood above it. Four stools were lined up on my side of the island. The sinks, dishwasher, and more counter space were against the wall behind the counter, along with a Cuisinart and a couple of other appliances. Misha's kitchen away from home, I assumed.
"Ah, you're finally up," I heard Misha say as he stepped out from behind the open door of the refrigerator. "The girls have gone shopping, but I am charged with fixing you breakfast. Gina said you get cranky if you don't eat. As it happens, there are few things I enjoy as much in life as fixing breakfast for myself or others."
"I believe that Gina said something about a shopping trip last night," I said as I padded across the floor and pulled up a stool to sit on. Notwithstanding the shower, I was still sleepy. I am one of those people who really don't function well without their first cup of coffee in the morning.
