This used to be my playground

For the next three weeks, I’ll be in Helsinki, Finland, to cover the hockey world championships. It’ll be my longest stay in my hometown since 2004 when Wife and I moved back to Stockholm after a two-year stint as a Swedish-Finnish couple in Finland.

I was born in Helsinki, I started school there, I went to university there, and I got my first real job there. I’ve also moved out of Helsinki four times.

My first apartment building. (My first elevator ride).

Today, I walked from the arena to the main train station, and I may have found my memory lane.

Walking from the arena, just a few hundred yards towards downtown, there’s a fair centre, and just on the other side of it, there’s the big sports centre where I played soccer in a real tournament for the first time. (We lost all games). Going up the hill, there’s the Pasila train station, the first stop for all outbound trains, and the last chance to get out if you realize you’ve made a huge mistake, and there place where Daughter’s Godfather and I would drive late at night in our college years for a burger.

Down the hill, there’s the gas station where I sometimes went with Dad after his hockey practice, when he just wanted to hang out with his buddies, and have a cup of coffee, and shoot the shit.

Across the street from the gas station, there’s the track where my parents took me to run and jump as a kid, and where I thirty years later went skating with Wife, pushing Son’s stroller in front of me.

Crossing the street again, you’ll walk by the children’s hospital where I spent a few months as a five-year-old, and the yellow separate building where I was kept in quarantine, to not get chicken pox or something, with a pile of books to keep me company.

A few hundred yards toward the city, there’s the hockey rink, now known as the old rink, but back then The Rink, the main venue of the 1974 and 1982 hockey world championships. That’s where I saw Esa Tikkanen for the first time, and where I saw Jari Kurri score the under-18 European championship gold medal winning goal in 1978, where I got one of my first hockey prizes when I was elected “most colorful player” in a under-12 tournament.

Behind the rink, there’s the Olympic Stadium where I saw Alberto Juantorena, the world’s number one ranked 400-meter runner, crush his competition, and where Dad and I went to watch Finnish league soccer – and eat nakkis, the small Finnish sausages.

From the Olympic Stadium you can almost see the apartment building where Wife and I lived ten years ago, and the apartment to which we brought Son for the first time. You can almost see the hospital he was born. The same hospital I was born in.

You can also see my old gym, the one where I made all my weight-lifting records, and where I lost my Mexican ring, and where I hung out with my best friend on most nights when I was single in Helsinki. There were often two men, in their 50s, who sat around, and worked out a bit, and we always wondered if we’d become like them.

Going past the gym, and the opera, walking on the path by the bay, there’s a red-brick wall which doesn’t seem to have any function at all but that’s where Wife taped her first ads for the parenting site she launched while we lived in Helsinki. The one that grew into the biggest Swedish-language site in Finland. There’s the huge oak tree under which she held annual picnics for the members of the site.

Across the street from there is where my uncle used to have his electronics store, and two blocks from there, there’s the apartment building where I lived the first five years of my life. A block from there is where I skated for the first time, a block the other way is where Dad slammed the trunk of our car shut without realizing my small fingers were holding on to the edge. Across the street there’s the church where I was baptized, where the Sunday school was, and a block down the hill is where the playground is. Where I played. Where Son played, too, and where I’ve taken Daughter to play as well.

It’s good to be back.

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