Buy a round for my friends
Anchorage, Alaska
I AM READING the guestbook in F Street Station, a bar in Anchorage, Alaska. It is early January, bitter cold outside, and crewmembers from my airline are the only patrons.
This bar is our hangout, conveniently located around the corner from our layover hotel. A flight attendant who died of a brain tumor the month before has left a bequest, several thousand dollars to buy a round of drinks for all her Flying Tigers flight attendant and pilot friends.
Barbro was Swedish, a hard-living type, probably a beauty in her day. Years of vodka and cigarettes coarsened her looks. She never married, had many lovers, and the airline was her life. She was very buxom and stashed all manner of things in her cleavage, paperwork, money, a pen. She was quite eccentric.
Once she told me that when I was a newhire at Flying Tigers, someone called her up to tell her, “Guess who just got hired by Tigers? Chuck Bier’s daughter.” I was totally surprised that somehow, somewhere, she knew my father. She never told me more, though I pestered her for awhile, then gave up. My father claimed he’d never met her and had no idea how she knew his name. Barbro refused to tell me more, took that information to her grave. She wasn’t much over 50 when the brain tumor claimed her life.
Everyone who has a drink on Barbro at F Street Station must sign the guest book. The owner of the bar will send it to her family in Sweden once the money runs out. Crewmembers reverently raise their drinks, toast Barbro, in fond remembrance of a dead friend.
No one abuses the one-drink policy.
