Spotify, the online music service, recently put its boys in the lab on the job to analyze 50 years’ worth of summer hits to come up with an exhaustive list of summer jams. And as you can expect, the list is a collection of fantastic songs, from “It’s my party” to “Ring my bell” to “Every breath you take” to “We like to party” to “Hips don’t lie” to “Call me maybe”.

Some more fantastic than the others, of course.

The full list has 130 songs on it, and according to Spotify’s team of scientists, the saddest and the slowest of them all is “Alone” by Heart, the Nancy and Ann Wilson sister act.

That’s not how I remember it.

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I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind
That I put down in words…
How wonderful life is, now you’re in the world

Moulin Rouge, the movie, came out in 2001, almost two years before Son was born. I didn’t know much about it, but for some reason I thought I wouldn’t like it, so I never watched it. About six months before Son was born, Wife and I traveled to Maine, and it was one of the movies shown on the plane, so I watched it with my nose about six inches from the six-inch screen, and I loved it.

When we got home, we saw it at a friend’s place, and then finally, on the big screen. And I loved it every time. For years, I had the “Can can can” song as my ring signal.

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The other day, as Son and Daughter and I were walking towards the bus stop, we noticed a lot of earthworms on the sidewalk.

Every step of the way, Son was yelling warnings to Daughter and me so that we wouldn’t step on them. There really were a lot of them and I jumped over each one to my please my animal loving kids. (“That’s why I don’t use worms, but bread, as a bait when we go fishing,” said Daughter). Meanwhile, the other half of my brain, the half that’s not in charge of my walking and jumping, was busy trying to come up with an answer to the question I knew was coming.

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The other day, while looking for stamps in my desk drawer, I found my old calculator. The one I used all through high school, the one I bought, or was told to buy, because I was a math guy. The one that saved me in my high school final exam.

Up until high school, I had been a languages guy, but once it was time to graduate to high school, I was told it’d be too much to try to do both math and physics, and still take another language. 

So I dropped my German studies – I took our German teacher’s house burning down to the ground as a sign – and bought a calculator. A “scientific calculator”, as it says on it.

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One recent late night, when I should have been writing, and was instead scrolling up and down my Facebook page, I saw the status of an acquaintance of mine – a Formula One reporter on Finnish TV – in which he wrote: “Heard that a version of my name may have been used in the Donald Duck magazine. Can anybody confirm that?”

A couple of days later, I asked him if he’d heard anything. He hadn’t. Then I asked him why he had asked that. 

“It’d be a great honor to be featured in the Donald Duck magazine,” he said. 

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Before Kurt Russell became Herb Brooks, the coach of the US hockey team in “Miracle”, the story of the team that beat the Soviets in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, he was Elvis. And if you think he was a great Herb Brooks, I’m here to tell you he was an even better Elvis.

I saw “Elvis” with my best friend in a Saturday matinee in 1979, in a movie theatre a little outside the city, close to the store where Dad worked. Interestingly enough, when I looked up the movie right now, it’s listed as a TV movie, but I’m positive I saw it in a theatre. Or maybe we just had a huge TV, after all, Dad always made sure we had the latest TVs and VCRs.

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If there ever was a grayer person, I had never seen him. He was so grey that the first time I saw him, I didn’t see him. But he must have skated past me. Now, I was standing on the sidelines, my eyes on Daughter out there learning to skate, so I didn’t pay attention to any other people on or off the ice.

I was also listening to music, so if the grey man had said something to me, I hadn’t heard a word.

I don’t know how many times he skated past me, but at some point, the fact that somebody was regularly blocking my view of the ice did register, and I had a good look at the guilty party. Having read this far you already know that he was the grayest person I’d ever seen, but let me try to describe to you just how grey he was.

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A few weeks ago, Son told me that he’d started a little support campaign for Santa Claus at school. Some of the kids had teased him about believing in Santa – “come on, you’re a fifth-grader” – so he had walked around the schoolyard with signs that said something like, “Santa’s real”, and “Free Santa”. And while he may have walked in support of a 300-year-old man, he did it in a 21st century style, with hashtags #freesanta, and #gottabelieve written on the bottom of the signs.

On our way home that day, after he’d told me about his campaign, he asked me if he was being silly.

“I mean, you believe in Santa, right?” he asked me.

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My first best friends were girls. The first of them all was S, the daughter of one of Dad’s best friends. She was born exactly a week after me, so having known her all my life, I guess she’s my oldest friend. She was the princess, I was the prince, her baby brother was the horse, as we got ready to live these lives of ours happily ever after. Just not together.

Then there was M, a girl I played with at Grandma’s place when I was maybe three or four, and us being friends seemed to be a big deal for Grandma who used to often bring it up years later.

“Oh, I remember how you guys used to play here, in that sandbox over there,” she’d say.

Or, “You were so cute, you and your friend M.”

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Son was at a Halloween party last week. It was a major milestone in his life – and mine – as it was the first after-school party he went to that wasn’t a birthday party. It was a Halloween party so they were asked to dress up in a costume.

Son decided he wanted to go as a Russian soldier.

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