Butterfly Crash

Following my last blog about a movie featuring two stupid guys crashing people's weddings, I had to use the word "crash" again today, in a real sense. An Airbus 340-300 aircraft from Paris, skidded the runway at the Pearson Airport, where we picked up our friends from Beijing two days ago, and crashed into a ravine in flames. Miraculously, all the 309 passengers and crew members survived with a few of them sustaining only minor injuries. What a relief!

I guess my friend Abby with diagnosed aerophobia (fear of flying) is not going to fly with me any time soon. I said to Abby that I won't permit myself to have such kind of psychological barrier like hers. "I am afraid of height though," I added. "You are starting to make more and more sense now," Abby responded with a chuckle.

Just this morning, hours before the crash, I was exchanging messages back and forth with my friend Suzanne in Paris. These were my words exactly, "welcome to our continent..." Suzannen was doing her last-minute packing before getting on a different airplane departing from the same airport as those surviving passengers, probably around the same time, to come to San Francisco.

At dinner, Sienna was unusually cooperative, letting me switch the channel to watch the crash scene report on TV. While answering her all sorts questions concerning the plane and the people, I couldn't help but start wondering about how different parts of the world are connected and effected one another. The famous chaotic theory explains: "a butterfly stirring the air today in Beijing can transform storm systems next month in New York." Let alone an airplane crash in Toronto, on a site 20 minutes drive away from my house off rush hour.

And consider this: in less than a month, we will be catching the same Airbus 340-300 across the Pacific Ocean to Beijing to catch that very same butterfly...