Sometimes, late at night, when the neighbourhood is quiet, and even the teenagers with the mopeds have gone to bed, I wake up. It’s the silence that wakes me up, but when I sit up, and listen, I can hear a long, whining sound in the distance.

And I laugh.

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For a fearful person, there can hardly be a worse place than the airport. An airport offers a concentration of people – and fears. There are the crowds, the closed spaces, the impending airplane ride. Public places mean lots of germs and lots of strange people. Foreigners who do not speak your language are everywhere.

For many of us, there is the common fear of buying a cup of coffee and realizing at the register that you do not have enough money and cannot speak the language – and are naked, too.

But mostly, airports are happy places.

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Below is a story I wrote for Profile. Also, in the issue, there's a fairytale version of a version of this. Check it out*.
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According to legend, Icarus didn’t listen to his father and flew too close to the sun, melting his wings. Angry Birds are ready to take their chances to become legendary. Then again, they aim for the moon.

Peter Vesterbacka has been called the most connected man in Finland, which, at face value, might not seem like much. Finland is, after all, a country with just a little over five million people. Vesterbacka’s rolodex, however, is not limited to just Finnish-sounding names.

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One summer, twenty years ago, I decided that I wanted to play soccer again. I hadn’t done it in years, but I got some guys together, mostly my hockey teammates, and I signed us up for a season in a recreational league.

Our red shirts with “Ericsson Hotline” on the chest were a donation from my Dad’s store, the numbers on the back I had ironed on myself. After all, that’s what coach-GMs do.

In one August evening match, we had a new guy on the pitch, a lanky, blond guy who had a fantastic stride as he flew down the left lane. He was one of my late recruits, a necessary addition, due to some injuries and general summer recreational soccer league no-shows.

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Many years ago, in a world without the Internet, when people in Finland didn’t want to line up to the bank to go pay their bills, they could send them to the bank to be automatically - in a world when IT was still automatic data processing - withdrawn from their account on the due date.

All banks had their own systems, but the one in which I worked one summer, had something they (we) called the Green Envelope. It couldn’t have been easier: all you had to do - besides have money - was to stuff the green envelope with your bills, and send it to the bank. And the best part was that those special green envelopes didn’t even need postage stamps.

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I know exactly when I knew that I probably wasn’t cut out to be a major league hockey player. Not that I really had thought about it much. When I was a kid, I just loved to play so I just moved from one age group to another, as simple as that.

Of course I had dreams, and of course I would have wanted to be just like Valeri Kharlamov, or Wayne Gretzky, or Hannu Kapanen, or Matti Hagman, or Frank Neal, all my big idols at one point.

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When Wife and I met over a decade ago – time flies when you’re having fun raising a family – the beginning of our relationship was all a big secret. After all, it was an office romance, and we didn’t want people talking about us, so we kept it all under wraps and during office hours, we acted normal. Nobody suspected anything.

Or so we thought.

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When Son was born, almost nine years ago, I used to see his small, wrinkled face in my mind whenever I closed my eyes. I could be lying on a bench at the gym, and his face would emerge in front of my eyes. It’s hardly surprising since most of the time when I had my eyes opened those first few weeks, I would see his little face, too.

I didn’t want to be one of those pushy new fathers, so I didn’t carry photos of him to show to people. The one image I carried with me, of him, wherever I went, was that mental one. And maybe that’s the one I will always have with me, and maybe that’s why he will always be my baby – even now when he’s a genius almost trilingual Ph.D of Harrypotterism.

But last night, and today, when I close my eyes, the image that I see is of a smiling Stefan Liv, the Swedish goalie of the Yaroslavl hockey team that was wiped out in a plane crash yesterday.

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A friend of mine is a synesthete, a person with a “neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway”. What it means in her case is that when she sees or hears a number, she sees a specific color.

To her, four is always blue.

And here I was thinking that I was special for always connecting the number 2 and the letter A.

For some reason, though, my view of the calendar is a bit skewed. I know it’s easy to connect the 12 months of the year to the 12 hours of a clock, but in my brain, the connection isn’t a straightforward “1 for January, 2 for February” one, even though my year does start at noon.

Noon is the New Year’s Eve.

Then we have the spring, and at 3, the summer strikes. It’s all nice and easy, hanging out in the sun, until seven. That’s when the summer’s over, the autumn falls, and the school starts. From 7, I work my way up towards Son’s birthday, around nine, to my birthday, around ten, and to Xmas at about 11.30.

Right now, my mental clock calendar is 7. That also means that the hockey season is about to start.

I might as well start by confessing that I’m one of those people who, back in 2000, walked around saying that having a camera in a mobile phone was idiotic.

Today, I’m one of the idiots that make the rest of the family wait for me, while I take a snap shot of a beautiful building – or a pile of dog poop that I think looks like Darth Vader.

And I love it.

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