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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Last night, Son was playing with his Nintendo, recording sounds and then altering them to make them funny, and he asked me to say something.

I thought about it for a second, and then said, “Are you a Finn? I’m a Finn, too.” But I said it in a gruffy voice.

“Perfect!” said Son, and laughed so hard he almost fell on the floor.

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Often, when I try to explain something to a friend or Wife, I find myself drawing analogies to hockey. It seems like such a simple way to make sense of the world. Not that it always is that, like when I try to explain the euro crisis drawing parallels to no-touch icing, but sometimes it is.

A hockey rink is a miniature version of the world – because there’s a mix of all kinds of people, and, hey, we are the world.

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Craven Cottage, if you don’t know, is the oldest football stadium in London and the home field of Fulham Football Club.

A few years ago, when I translated a soccer magazine from Swedish into Finnish, there was a story about the legend of Cottage, its demise and return to the days of glory and while I didn’t remember much of the story when I got there, I remembered this much: Craven Cottage was a magical place.

And there we were, Buddy and I, last Saturday. We clapped our hands when the players walked onto the pitch, cheered on Fulham – “Come on Fuuuuuuulham” – and jumped onto our feet when Berbatov scored for Fulham. Well, I did, Buddy just laughed at me. We ate the longest hotdogs I’ve ever seen, and we took a lot of photos. However, while the match was fine, it wasn’t magical.

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All I know about the guy is that his name was Lothar. He was one of those people that I sort of thought I knew when I never knew him at all. I knew he was a hockey player, and today, 25 years since I last saw him, I don’t even remember where we played together – or whether we ever did.

I think we may have played together on my university’s ice time, or maybe not. He may have gone to the same university with me, although I don’t think he did. Our paths crossed only a few times in the late 1980s, maybe early 1990s.

In short, all I know is that did play hockey, that we kind of knew each other, and, while I didn’t know his real name, I knew he was called Lothar after Mandrake the Magician’s best friend, the Prince of the Seven Nations, and more importantly, the world’s strongest man.

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Was I worried that she’d say no? Well, I did expect her to say yes, but I was ready for a no, too. Honestly.

I had originally imagined myself on my knee in front of her, holding the most beautiful ring in my hand. The snow would fall on us slowly, and she’d fight off the tears, then tell me to get up, but she’d say it in a romantic comedy sort of way, so she’d say, “get up, you big old… you big, you…” but she wouldn’t be able to finish the sentence because I’d be up, and we’d kiss.

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