Category Archives: True story

“Tell me a story”

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The other day, at the Gelateriana Italiana, when Son, Daughter, and I were having our usual Friday ice creams, Son pulled an essay he had written out of his school bag. It was a story he’d written the week before, and had now got it back, graded.

“You gotta read what the teacher wrote,” he told me.

Unsurprisingly – both because he does tell a good story and because he hadn’t asked me to read it had it not been praise – the teacher had praised his storytelling skills, his vocabulary, and his cliffhangers.

“Congrats. This is fantastic. I guess I can take some of the credit here, after all, I did tirelessly tell you stories when you were just a small boy,” I told him.

He nodded. storytelling_here_sign Continue reading →

Words of wisdom

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Had the self-checkout machine worked properly, I hadn’t even seen him there. I would have just paid for my taco chips, hot salsa, baloney, and a carton of milk (the one thing I had actually come to buy) and then gotten on my bike and riden home.

But the scanner didn’t send the items to the cloud, or whatever, so the self-checkout didn’t work, and when I went back to the screen, having violently shaken the scanner in its locking station, I saw him stand outside the grocery store with his lady friend.

I like bumping into people like that because it somehow makes me feel part of the community, and especially so now that I’m the associate assistant coach of Daughter’s soccer team.

And the man was a father of a player on the team, so I gave him a quick wave and a smile, before focusing on the checkout again.

Just as I realized the scanner still hadn’t sent my baloney to the cloud or whatever, the man (and his lady friend) walked into the store, and right behind me he turned to me and said, “Enjoy this time while you can.”

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Happy camper

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Twelve years ago, Wife and I shook hands in the little kitchen of our little apartment in downtown Helsinki, on a closed deal. She’d start up a Swedish-language site and a discussion forum for expecting and new parents, and I would start up a Finnish-language site and a discussion forum for … hockey fans.

Wife’s site was up and running a few weeks later, and it turned into a big success.

Meanwhile, I was still working at my day job, while trying to get my writer friends to contribute to my new magazine that was going to come out that fall, still six months away. I wrote several articles myself, translated the ones my buddies – and brother-in-law – had written in English and Swedish, traveled to Sweden to meet with the designer who donated his time for my cause, negotiated with the printers, and the distribution channels, while trying to be a father and a boyfriend.

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Glory days

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What sticks to our minds really is a curious thing. What is a throwaway line to one of us may be something the other person remembers thirty years later, for one reason or another.

This morning I posted a photo of the Finnish language exam we had in our high school finals. Basically, it’s a list of 14 topics we could choose to write an essay about. I don’t remember what I wrote about, although I could make an educated guess, knowing the frame of mind of the teenage me.

The topics ranged from literary analysis to why sports matters to rise and fall of an empire to what makes me me.

I know my Finnish teacher used to like my musings on life so I’m pretty sure I wrote about what makes me me, but it may not have been my best work, and since we wrote two essays, my official submission may have been something completely different and come from the second set of topics.

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It’s all good

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Believe it or not, I do remember the moment I read the April 1997 issue of the Rolling Stone magazine. I was traveling on business – if you consider government employees’ travel as business – in Newfoundland in Canada. I had just checked in at my hotel in St. John’s and hadn’t had time to finish reading the article on the plane so fighting off the jetlag, I picked up the magazine again.

And this is what I remember: MTV’s trend watchers said that the next big thing would be “good”. Not just a good thing, but that being good, instead of bad, would be the next megatrend in pop. They said they could see signs of the pendulum going from the dangerous Madonnas, and Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” towards artists and movies that represented goodness.

I remember it because it surprised me and because I hoped it to be true. Because I considered myself a good guy, a nice guy, and for once, I also wanted that to mean that I was cool as well.

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Wild goose hunt

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I’m not much of an inventor, but I’ve always admired inventors, ever since my first glue experiments as a five-year-old. The purpose of the experiment was to see which one of three glues dried up the fastest, and I remember how carefully I held the piece of paper with the samples on my lap on the back seat of our car, on our way to my grandparents’ place, and the playhouse that was my laboratory.

I took the glue samples in, and then promptly forgot about them when I got excited about other things. Such as a football.

A few years later, I carried with me a red hardcover Gyro Gearloose’s Guidebook everywhere, whenever I wasn’t sitting on our balcony with Mom’s old typewriter, copying passages of the guidebook into a book of my own. Turns out I didn’t get any inventions into my brain that way, but it may have put me in a writer’s frame of mind. Also, it was nice out there on the balcony.

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Fact: I can’t build anything, and I can’t fix anything. I don’t understand how an engine works, and I don’t know how you can build a bridge across deep waters (although that’s never stopped me from writing about those things) but the desire to invent something is still inside me.

Something. Anything.
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Wild, said Zed

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I had just sat down at the table to ask Wife about something when the man came rushing to our table and also sat down. His face looked familiar, but so did dozens of other’s and just like all of them, I couldn’t put together a name and a face, let alone figure out how the man was related to Wife.

It was my third time at Wife’s family reunion on her father’s side, and with the reunions being arranged every three years, and us missing one, I’ve been going to them almost ten years now. But I’m still an outside looking in, which is fine. The family is organized like the Mafia in that everybody knows his or her close family, and how people are related, but very few have the big picture.

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Put on your red shoes

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In the summer of 1983, everybody I knew bought the same two albums. One of them was Police’s “Synchronicity”, the other David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”. “Every Breath You Take” was playing everywhere, as was the title song of the Bowie album, and by “everywhere” I mean the EF disco in downtown Oxford every Wednesday.

I spent a month in Oxford that summer, learning English and learning to be English. My English was pretty good before the trip, but it did improve there as well, and as far as being English goes, I did my best and watched Wimbledon and cricket with Jim, the father of my host family.

He was in his 70s, and nothing could make him leave his TV chair during cricket.

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Man with a magic jacket

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One of the coolest pieces of clothing I know is a blue spring jacket. To me, a blue jacket is a true sign of spring, just like running shoes, and a net bag in which I’d carry my soccer ball.

As soon as Mom let me wear running shoes outside, take a soccer ball to the back yard, and wear my blue jacket, winter was over.

When I was twelve, I had a blue winter jacket as well. Most kids in my hockey team had one, a team jacket, as did Mom and Dad, so we, too, made a good-looking team. But Dad also had a blue spring jacket, sort of like a bomber jacket except that wasn’t what we called them then, and it was a little more special than any other jacket I’ve ever seen.

Dad’s jacket was a magic jacket.

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