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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On our way up to my Dad’s on the kids’ fall break, we stopped at a gas station to get some gas, sandwiches, and to go the bathroom. Son walked in, looked around the place, and the few people hunched over their cups of coffee and their donuts, and he said, with sunshine in his voice: “Dad, this is a typical Finnish hangout.”

And it was. The gas stations used to be where people hung out and back when I was a teenager, we only had two real coffee shops in town. One of them was across the street from my Dad’s store, the other next to a bank, and being a block away from the market square, a little too far for me. So, if I ever went to a café – which I hardly ever did – I’d pick the one across the street from Dad’s store.

My hangout was the cafeteria at the hockey rink. That’s where I always found buddies, but not having a cup of coffee, but playing Pac-Man or another arcade game.

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For a short while, Son’s favorite song was one about a man on a polar expedition gone wrong. In the song, the man – his name is Alfred Pesonen – falls through the ice, but somehow gets back up and survives. The setback frustrates him, though, and he decides to go for an African expedition instead. While there, he sees elephants and, impressed by their size and strength – “that would beat even a walrus” – he decides to take a few of them with him to another polar expedition.

Unfortunately, the African elephants, not used to the arctic conditions, die, even though Alfred covers them with fur coats. Alfred gives up, and goes hunting for a white whale.

Years later, when scientists find them, they take them for mammoths.

Well, I can’t be entirely sure it was Son’s favorite song, because he was just a few months old when I sang it to him daily, but it’s one of the top songs on one of my favorite albums of all time: Kake Singers debut album from 1979.

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A few weeks ago after dinner, Sister-in-law told us about a fun game she had played at work. Or, maybe it was a work-related event, because while guessing TV themes is no brain surgery, I wouldn’t want the actual brain surgeons humming the X-files tune when they ask for the scalpel.

She had her iPhone in her hand, and she played the tunes one by one. And Wife, me, and Brother-in-law shouted out our guesses.

“Twin Peaks!”
“Friends!”
“Seinfeld!”

And then, after the first few bars of another tune, while I was still trying to put the familiar tune together with the show, Brother-in-law yelled: “ALF!”

And I kicked myself under the table. Alf! I should have got that one. After all, I still quote jokes from Alf. Oneliners like, “Noses run in my family,”, “I kill me”, and “I guess you had to be there … I WAS!”

But out loud, I said, “Oh, of course … Alf … for Alien Life Form, but he was really Gordon Shumway from Melmac,” I said, in an attempt to show off my vast Alf knowledge, because, yes, my dinner companions just had to know that one 1980s orange puppet was “really” from “Melmac”.

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Just like “there are times when the Phantom leaves the jungle and walks the streets of the town like an ordinary man”, you can sometimes spot me jogging a little around the neighborhood. Not very often, never far from home, but still, out there, with my lazy eye of the tiger.

Yesterday was one such day.

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Long before I had moved to Sweden, or met Wife, and long before there was Son and even longer for Daughter, I sat on a train. It was a red train, a commuter train, so you know it was a long time ago because it was when the trains were red, and the seats were blue, before the red-and-white and the green-and-blue-and-white trains, and before the platform at the Helsinki train station had got its roof.

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As I type this, every once in a while I catch a glimpse of something orange hovering over my keyboard. It’s the plastic bracelet with the New York Mets’ logo on it, together with their slogan, “Ya gotta believe!” I’ve been wearing it around my wrist for two weeks now.

I’ve been trying to become a fan for years. A fan of … anything, really, but mostly a team of some non-hockey sports team. My method has aways been the same: I first make up my mind about the sport, then go about deciding which team to choose – then buy that team’s fan merchandise.

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My first trip to New York City was a 30-hour layover on my way from Montreal, Canada to Helsinki, Finland. I had been at a sports fair in Canada, and had somehow managed to convince my boss that it was a good idea for me to travel through JFK, and, well, did it really matter if I stayed there for three hours or thirty? He didn’t think it did.

That’s how I arrived in New York City late on a Friday night. I was going to stay at a friend’s place in New York, and not only had he welcomed me to his home, he had also arranged for a driver to greet me at the airport.

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