Greetings from Helsinki. I’m here, officially for some interviews for a book project, but since Daughter now lives here, I’m just as much here to see her.
We just took a bus from her apartment to the hockey rink, and walking through the small forest to get there was almost like walking through the wardrobe and into Narnia, or – I know you expect me to say this – accelerate a flux capacitor powered DeLorean to 88 mph.
In short: what a trip.
See, my first sensory hockey memory is from here, from this rink, from a time when it was still an outdoor rink. I remember walking with Dad through some snow – for what seemed like a long, long time – and then being allowed into the dressing room.
I’ll never forget that smell.
It was in that rink that I played when I had just picked up hockey, and it was there I practiced skating on Saturdays during public skating. It was at that rink that I was first interviewed for a magazine. Me and two sons of family friends played a little in the corner of the rink with a photographer giving us instructions on what to do, and afterwards the reporter asking me questions about hockey.
“Is it fun to play hockey?” she asked me. “Yeah.”
“What’s most fun?”
“Scoring goals.”
“How about body checking, and hitting others? Is that fun.”
“I guess.”
The headline was something along the lines of “Hitting is fun.”
Outside the rink, there’s the track where I represented my school in the 60-meter dash in the Helsinki school competitions. Mom and Dad bought me new shoes, red ones, with spikes. I made the semifinal.
Right next to the track, there’s a soccer field and that’s where we played the soccer camp final. Afterwards, the head councilor, a Team Finland basketball star, and a future MP, made us all stand in line so that he could hand out the Player of the Match prize. He crouched and picked something from the ground and then called out my name. I was the Player of the Match, he said, as he handed me a can pull tab. I didn’t mind; I was the Player of the Match.
Between the running track and the soccer field, there’s a running trail that I have run many, many, many times, with my teammates in our off-ice practices. It was also that same trail that was the venue of another running competition I participated in, only that time not entirely voluntarily.
My best friend was a great runner, and even a member of a track team and since we were friends, his Dad and my Dad thought I, too, should take part in the race.
I did. I think I finished.
It was to this hockey rink I was on my way in college, waiting for a bus in a snowstorm when I made up my mind to get that driver’s license – and a car – after all.
And it was in the pool to my right that I never learned to swim. But boy, did they try. Oh, how they pulled me around the pool with that awful rattan ring when all I wanted to do was go back to the kids’ pool and play Tarzan (fighting crocodiles).
Good times.
In its own way, this place shaped me and made me the fast-running, long-distance-running-hating, soccer-playing, hockey-loving wannabe-Tarzan that I am.
Nice to be back.