In 1959, Paul Anka played at the Linnanmäki theme park in Helsinki, and the country went nuts. “Paul Anka at Linnanmäki” became a catch phrase to describe a wild and crazy herd of people. It was Beatlemania before there were the Beatles. He was a teen idol, a pop star in an era when there weren’t any.

At the same time, he was still rooted in a tradition that was different from the one that the Beatles and the Stones and the rest came from.

Twenty years later, in 1979, he was back – not that I know that he was gone – thanks to a major Fifties revival. Happy Days was on TV, The Fonz taught us how to be cool, we listened to Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, and the Stray Cats, and rockabilly ruled OK. The hair was combed back again, the jeans got rolled (way) up, and the only accepted pair of jeans were Levi’s 501s.

Somewhere in that landscape there was Paul Anka, not being a lame crooner, but instead, one of the respected hit makers of the 1950s.

So respected, and so hip, that his songs were played over and over at our 5th grade class disco in 1979. My parents happened to own a couple of the cool albums, even if both of them – the albums, not parents – were in the low end of the cool spectrum. One was a Platters album, and the other Paul Anka’s Greatest Hits.

I knew the songs by heart in 1979, and I’m proud – proud, ya hear! – to say that I can still break out into a pretty good “It’s Time To Cry”, “Diana”, or “Crazy Love”.

But in 1979, at the school disco, I truly mastered my Paul Anka. I knew all the lyrics to all the songs, and I’m pretty confident I knew the correct lyrics, too, even if I can’t be completely sure because the inner sleeve of the Anka album was just white.

Fifth graders can be awkward, or could back then. Maybe the kids start acting weird younger these days, but in our class then, getting the boys to dance was deemed simply impossible. All the boys wanted to dance with the girls, we knew that. Well, not all boys with all girls, but at least some boys with the special girls, but none of us had the guts to do it.

Our teacher knew this, so she imposed a one markka (let’s say a quarter) fine for the boys who wouldn’t accept an invitation to dance when a girl asked him to. (Note: that’s right, those were the rules). So I danced. I danced fast ones, I danced slow ones, I danced with my favorite girl, and I danced with my non-favorites.

When my parents picked me up from this after-school disco at around 8 pm, they were very curious about the disco as we walked the 600 meters from the school to our house. How was it, what did you do? As I kicked some of those loose pebbles on the pavement, I told them very casually what we had done, and about the dancing.

“You danced?” my father asked me.

“I had to, the teach made us pay a markka otherwise,” I said (only now realizing what a smart teacher she had been, giving us the perfect alibi).

“Well, that’s nice, I’m happy to hear you danced,” my mother said, and then we walked past the senior citizens home, and the old church, before we crossed the street and went home.

What I didn’t tell them was that when I had been dancing with Minna, definitely a favorite girl of mine, I had also sung the Paul Anka songs, which impressed her immensly. “You know the lyrics to all the songs … and you sing so well,” she had told me.

The rest of the spring, I happened to ride my bike around Minna’s neighborhood a lot, trying to accidentally bump into her, but it took me another thirty years to actually say “put your head on my shoulder” to a girl.

I never thought the girl would be my sick three-year-old daughter.

But it was, and I did. And then she put her head on my shoulder. And it felt good.

There was nowhere else I wanted to be.