Will there be a countdown of the best stories on ristopakarinen.com this year, you ask? The answer if yes. The same procedure as every year. Starting on Dec 27, I’ll publish the top stories of the year. This year’s categories are True Fiction and Attempts at Humor. (New entries will be published at 2:02 pm CET each day).
And without further ado, here are the stories that finished in the fifth place.
» Attempt at humor: “Tommy’s mistake”
» True Fiction: “Watch this“
For the first time in my life, I have a garage, and I think that’s very exciting. From what I’ve heard, all kinds of exciting things take place in garages. Deep Throat met with Woodward and Bernstein in a large garage – “Large Garage”, a great pen name for someone – many bands have honed their acts in a garage, both Apple and Google got their starts in garages, and these days, one of the most famous garages is the one in which Marc Maron tapes his podcasts.
Having a band rehearsal on a parking lot, or sitting at a typewriter in a car port is just not the same thing.
The other day, as Son and Daughter and I were at the subway station, waiting for a train, Daugher told me that it was true, there was actually a place called Korvatunturi (Ear Mountain) in Finland.
“Did you know that?” she asked me.
I told her I did.
She didn’t say it, but something else was implied in her question and remark. The fact that if the grown-ups kept telling her that Santa Claus lives at Korvatunturi in Finland – and at least one grown-up in her life does – and if there is such a place for real, then there must be something to this Santa business.
My father was in Turkey on a vacation a few weeks ago. Last week, he paid a visit to us and on our way back from the airport, he rolled up his left sleeve and showed me his watch.
“Got myself a new watch in Turkey,” he said.
“Oh yeah? Ten bucks?” I asked him.
“No, no, this is a real watch. A lot more than that,” he said, and added after pause, “but not three figures.”
“Looks nice.”
“I looked it up online, a watch like this is worth 8000 euro –when it’s a real Breitling. But really, who buys a watch worth 8000 euro?”
If a song was written in 1904, is it a traditional folk song? Maybe not, but I didn’t care because I was in fourth grade, and I didn’t know the song was written in 1904, or that a version of it had been in an early 1960s Finnish movie. Our teacher had probably picked that one to make our music class a little more contemporary.
It didn’t, but I didn’t care. I just loved singing the song.
I sat in the front row, as I often did, being a small kid. The big kids could see from behind a smaller one, but us shorties wouldn’t have seen anything sitting behind a big, we were told, so I sat in the front row even in music class, even though it didn’t really matter there.
Shortly after Son was born, in the middle of the greyest time of the year in Helsinki, Finland, my mother asked me if I ‘d ever thought that I wouldn’t have kids at all. She was holding him in her arms and Wife and I were getting ready for our first night out without the baby – “Finding Nemo”, a long story, will tell later – so I quickly just told her I hadn’t – because that was the truth.
It’s just that I hadn’t thought about having kids, either. I simply didn’t think much. When I was a teenager, and my buddies talked about their dream cars and dream girls, I sat in the sidelines, listening, because I didn’t have either.
And yet, somehow I ended up with my dream car – turns out it was a Volvo V50 – and the dreamiest of my dream girls, Wife. And with her, our dream children.
When I moved to Sweden in 1998, I stayed the first week in an apartment that belonged to a friend of friend, before moving into another apartment that I rented from a future colleague. Well, she was already a colleague, but only for a few days. My first week there, I didn’t have any furniture so I spent my nights lying on a borrowed mattress in the kitchen, reading under the kitchen hood light.
No surprise then, that I didn’t have the right cable package to watch the hockey World Championships three weeks later, although I did have electricity and a couch at home. I followed the tournament in the papers, and did watch half of one game in a bar with another new colleague of mine, but didn’t see the final games between Sweden and Finland.
TORONTO – OMNI Television is offering new Canadians the opportunity to create their own hockey traditions with “Hockey Night in Canada: Punjabi Edition”, “Your Hockey” weekly segments, and “Hockey 101” …[that answers] basic questions that many new fans may be too afraid to ask, such as “What is icing?” and “What is holding?”
– Rogers media release, September 24, 2014
Dear student of hockey,
Welcome to Hockey 101! We’re thrilled to tell you that you have been accepted into the OMNI program in which we’ll study the game of hockey, and look for answers to questions you may have been too afraid to ask.
I don’t think I had seen a homeless person until I was in my twenties. I must have been aware of the people walking around, sitting on park benches, but those were mostly referred to as people who were down and out, maybe just as “drunks”.
I remember the uproar when the streets of Helsinki were wiped clean of such individuals before the CSCE meetings in Helsinki and I remember reading the daily political cartoons in the paper, and there was one recurring character who represented these people.
