One of the upsides of being a freelance writer is that I say yes to assignments I might not otherwise get or find, or look for. I just came home from an interview with a young Indian woman, Mala. The actual story will be more of a business story, but she also told me about her other project, an educational project back home in India.

Mala is 28, or so, a daughter of two professors. One a philosopher, the other an engineer, and they had lived in Germany and the US, they’d been in Finland and Sweden, and she was looking to work in cancer research, and getting her Ph.D.

A couple of years ago, she was back home in India, in a town south of Calcutta, thinking about her options, wondering whether she should pursue her doctorate or whether to switch lanes completely. That’s when she became friends with the young girl who used to come to their house to help her mother clean it.

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Off the top of my head, I can think of five races that I’ve run in. The first one a 60-meter dash in fourth grade, the second a three-kilometer race a couple of years later, the third a 100-meter race in high school, the fourth a 5-kilometer run in Harbor Beach, Michigan, the year after, and the fifth,a relay in my second year in business school.

I was never a great runner. I like to remember that I made it to semifinal in that first race and I also tell the kids I ran in the final in the high school 100-meter race.

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Next to my bed, under the nightstand, and under a stack of books that I’d like to have read already, there’s a little basket for things that don’t have a place anywhere else: an Oscar Wilde book, a pair of socks, some comic books, old issues of Wired and New Yorker, a baseball hat, and a sweatband.

And then there’s a copy of R.M. Ballantyne’s “The Coral Island”, a book that I read a dozen times as a boy. Every once in a while I take it up and ask Son if he’d like to read it, but so far, Harry Potter and the Three Detectives have always pulled him stronger.

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I’ve always liked the Helsinki airport. Back in the olden days, when I was a wide-eyed boy – instead of this wide-eyed man I’ve become – the airport was one of the family’s favorite Sunday afternoon drive destinations. Back then, the planes took off and landed right in front of the main terminal, and kids, like myself, even got to climb all the way to the window to see them go up and down.

There was nothing more exciting than to hear my dad say on a Sunday afternoon:

“Wanna go see some planes?”

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The most super of all the superheroes I’ve liked is the one who isn’t even a superhero, but instead, just your regular noble man, born in the deepest jungles of Africa, then adopted by apes after the same apes killed his parents.

Tarzan.

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