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Today was the day we’d come to Russia for – to visit the Hermitage Museum and the seventy-four paintings (a major trove of French Impressionist paintings from a German collection) stolen from the Red Army and been hidden for fifty years in the Hermitage. This exhibit was opened to the public for the first time on March 30, 1995 and titled “Hidden Treasures Revealed”.

The gloomy, grey sky seemed to follow my laborious trek to the stalled baggage claim carousal. Grandma Kay – always the efficient traveler who once hailed a New York cab driver with the flourish and theatrics of an opera diva – told me to wait by the carousal while she flagged a taxi. I tried not to think about the sunny skies of California, my husband who I was already missing, our three dogs and the cozy office I’d left behind.

Why would I be writing about Russia instead taking another trip down memory lane with John and Helen St. John? Because Russia has a short, but uniquely special place in my heart.

It isn’t about who caught the largest fish, or the fish that weighed the most, or the fish that put up the biggest fight, or the fish that won the “Fish of the Day” contest. This blog is about how two very different people forged a special relationship, and how fishing played a big part of how that relationship happened. But neither of us knew it at the time.