Category Archives: 80s Greatest Hits

Door 4: Campfire stories

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These days, news travel fast. We still get the morning paper, and we read it at the breakfast table every morning, always sharing the different sections the same way: News and Culture to Wife, Sports and Stockholm News to me, and if we see anything we think might interest Son and Daughter – who read comics – we’ll give the article to them.

Often when Wife tells me about something she read, both Son and I will have already heard it. Now, my excuse is that I’m a freelance writer so I tend to spend too much time reading my RSS feeds and scrolling down my social media timelines. Son? Well, he’s a teenager.

News hasn’t always traveled that fast. Back in the 1980s, of course, you couldn’t find a video stream, legal or illegal, to any sports event online and even the TV sports news had to use still photos from boxing matches in America.

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Door 3: Buddies

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During my university years, my student apartment in Helsinki was an old hotel room converted into a student apartment which gives you a good idea of what it was like but in short: it was tiny.

I didn’t need much, though, just my vinyls and an ever growing collection of CDs that provided me with the most of the soundtrack of my life. Also, I had Sky Channel and its music shows so there was always music playing in the background from the moment I got up and grabbed the remote to the moment when it fell on the floor from my hand.

And yet, when I think back to those days, I think of just two songs.

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Door 2: Rusty cans

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In 1986, I spent six weeks of varying gloriousness in Harbor Beach, Michigan, on a summer exchange program. It was a memorable summer in many ways but one of the highlights was that I got to taste New Coke. They were exciting times because not only was there Classic Coke and New Coke, there was also Cherry Coke and Diet Coke, which had been introduced to the Finnish market two years earlier as Coca-Cola Light.

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My invisible friend

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Everybody should have a friend like Emma. I don’t know if I deserved her, or if that’s even a word you can ever use about your friends, but I’m really happy she’s my friend. Or that she was my friend. Or possibly is, I don’t know which word to use since I haven’t seen her in almost thirty years.

It’s always been like that, though. Not that you always don’t see her for thirty years, but it’s always been Emma who’s chosen the level of friendship we were going to have.

Her first words to me were, “We’re going to be friends forever.”

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Hold on to the nights

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Andy always said that “not every night ends at the karaoke bar, but every good night does”, but Andy was always saying stuff like that. He was one of those guys who always had an answer to everything, and not only that, he made his answers sound like they were eternal truths, originally from God (or something) that had since been passed from generation to generation to him, and him only.

“Any decision you make mustn’t take longer than it takes to cook an egg” was one.

“People who wear hats are always hiding something” was another.

“Never eat a meal alone” was a third, but there were dozens of others.

The one that we lived our lives by right then was the one I quoted first, the one about the karaoke places. That’s how I found myself sitting in a dark bar with my back against the wall, surrounded by a group of people I didn’t know. Andy didn’t, either, but since “strangers are only people you haven’t gotten drunk with yet”, that’s where we were.

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Break on through

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He wasn’t a religious person. He was, however, “a spiritual person”. His words.

It meant that he was snacking on the big buffet table of different faiths and beliefs. Some days he believed in reincarnation, other days in nothing, and on yet some other days, he believed in everything from astrology to God to magic and other dimensions. Those were the days he was at his happiest, although, it was difficult to see cause and effect there.

In short, the happier he was the more he believed in everything and everybody but effect could have also gone in the other direction.

And he was never happier than when he walked through town early in the morning in the summer after a long day and night in his favorite bar in the middle of the said town.

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The Ghost of Utra

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My great-grandmother had always told her daughter that when she died, she’d come back as a ghost, and she’d haunt their home.

“But in a good way,” she’d said, “like a house sitter.”

By the time I was born, my great-grandmother had already passed away but she had, by my grandmother’s account, found her way back into the house. Whenever my grandma couldn’t find her keys, she blamed her mother. When the windows were open when she got home from the store – her mother’s doing. When people were walking their dogs outside her house, and the barked, they could see something not any human couldn’t: her mother.

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