dima, are you down there?

When I lived in Alta I had a friend from Murmansk named Dima. He was my height - maybe a little shorter - and had a haircut that I called "helmet head." He didn't know that, though. As I was driving through the serenely Soviet streets of Murmansk this weekend - passing grey concrete building after grey concrete building - I wondered if maybe he was in one of them. Maybe he got an engineering degree and got married and had a kid. I even opened up a phonebook thinking that I might be able to determine how to spell Polykov in Russian.
Nope.
I had an urge while standing on top of a hill overlooking the segmented city to shout out "DIMA!? ARE YOU DOWN THERE?" But my shout would have gotten drowned out by the clanks and booms and groans of the shipyard below once it made it to the bottom. It was the industrial soundtrack to the industrial city - and it beat everything.
I didn't find Dima this weekend. But I am able to picture him as a kid. Running down the stairs of his building, throwing rocks at metal barrels and walls, bounding over railroad tracks and hiding behind smoke stacks. I think he was a happy kid.