One day, in second grade, I came home from school with a form that I was supposed to return the next day, with my choice of foreign languages filled in. I was asked to rank the languages in order of preference, and with luck, my number one choice would be the one I’d start studying the next fall.

Coca-Cola had come to Finland with the Summer Olympics in 1952, and by the time I was about to make that language choice, that faraway Nordic country had fallen in love with Rodney in “Peyton Place”, and Ben Cartwright in “Bonanza”.

Then the 50s America was cool, and “Happy Days” was cool. While Fonzie was the coolest of cool, even Ralph Malph had something I really wanted. A cool high school jacket.

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In one of my first soccer tournaments ever, in one of the biggest ones at least, our coach told me before a game against a Swedish team that he’d make another boy the captain of the team for that game.

“It’s just because he speaks Swedish, you know,” the coach told me.

I took off the captain’s armband and handed it over to the coach who told me I’d be the captain in the next game again.

I was about ten years old, and I knew the coach was right. I didn’t speak Swedish. I only knew how to count to ten, and then fake it to thirteen. I knew just one other word in Swedish: Kött. “Meat”.

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Jim Hines. I never saw Jim Hines run, but when I was a kid, he was one of the sprinters I knew by name because that Jim Hines held the 100 meter world record. His 9.95 was the ultimate goal the others were chasing. One of them was my favorite sprinter, Valeri Borzov, of Soviet Union. He was also the great, white hope of the sport at the time, especially after he won the Olympic gold in 1972.

He must have become the Pakarinen household favorite a year earlier, though, in 1971, when he won both the 100 meter race and the 200 meter race at the European Championships held in Helsinki. I remember watching Borzov at the 1976 Olympics, in Montreal, and my father admiring the thighs on the Ukrainian.

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“Becky’s dinah, nothing finah.”

For somebody coming from a country that has “our land is poor, so it remains, if you long for gold, a stranger sure abandons it, but to us, the most precious land is this” written in the national anthem, having too many options isn’t always a good thing.

After all, life is so much easier when there are just two TV channels, like in the Finland of my youth, or when the breakfast choice was simply porridge with strawberry dessert creme, which I had when Dad took me to the diner around the corner from our apartment in the Helsinki of my youth.

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“Are we really going to do this,” Wife asked me. She was half-sitting and half-sleeping on the couch as the athletes were marching into the London Olympic Stadium. About an hour earlier, she had been sitting, and fully awake, admiring the Opening ceremony, amazed by the production and delighted by the appearance by the Queen.

“I mean, they’re just at H, and we’ve seen Finland, this is going to take hours,” she said.

“Oh, it’s only once every four years. Besides, I really think they’ll have a big surprise in the end. It’s not going to be just Paul McCartney singing Hey Jude, I think it’s going to be a Beatles reunion. It’ll be Paul and Ringo and holograms of John and George,” I said.

“You want something to eat? A sandwich?” I then asked her on my way to the kitchen. I didn’t have to see Honduras marching in. But I did want to see the Beatles.

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I had only been back to Vierumäki a couple of times in the last few decades, mostly just for an interview or two, and never for more than a couple of hours, but that didn’t stop me from acting as if I knew my way around the place as I showed the family how to get from the hotel to the rink and the track.

As usual, things had changed in my absence, and as usual, I told Wife all about it. I told her that the hotel must have been brand new, and how where the new rink was now, there used to be an outdoor rink. Then I also pointed out all the things that seemed to be exactly the way I remembered them from my camp.

In 1982.

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The first one was an accident, really. I was just sitting there on the swing with Son and Daughter when I happened to drop my sandal. I picked it up, sat down again, got some more speed, and then kicked the sandal off my foot so that it landed a few meters from the swings.

And then the other one.

And then I stopped the swing and walked barefoot to get my sandals. Just as I was about to slip one of them back on, I saw a blue plastic sandal in the air. Son had kicked off his new pair of Crocs.

I rushed back to the swings, and this time, I made the swing go higher, and really fast, so that I could make my sandal fly far, so far. One, two, three, I swung back and forth four times, and on the fifth, I kicked off my left sandal.

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Ever since I was four years old, I remember my parents telling me that I’d be great at French. One day, when I was going to be a little bigger, and then a grown-up, I would be speaking fluent French like there was no tomorrow. Or demain.

The reason they told me that wasn’t because our little three-person unit in Helsinki was especially France loving or sophisticated. They told me that simply because I couldn’t roll the r’s in a Finnish way, but instead, let them roll deep in my throat.

One day I could turn that into an asset, they assured me. This is a story of that day.

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Last night, just before Riccardo Montolivo was about to shoot his penalty kick in Italy’s Euro2012 semifinal against England, I told Wife that he was going to miss it.

“You can see the fear in his eyes,” I told her. “He’s never going to score.”

Montolivo missed the goal by a half a meter.

“Told you so,” said the man in the armchair. Me.

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When I was nine years old, my favorite football club in the world, the one that I dreamed of one day playing for, was the New York Cosmos. The reason was obvious. The Cosmos had Pelé, and everybody knew he was the best player in the world. If the Cosmos wouldn’t sign me, I wanted to play for Santos, Pelé’s club in Brazil.

He had just retired, though, but even if I may have known that, it didn’t bother me because my father worked at an appliance store that sold this new invention called a video recorder.

On one of those mysterious black boxes called video recording cassettes, he had recorded a show that told me the story of Pelé, all the way from Edson Arantes do Nascimento’s childhood in poor Brazil to his heroics in the World Cup, to his 1000th goal, to his seven-million dollar contract with the Cosmos, and to his last game in New York, against Santos.

In my head, while shooting a ball against the wall of our apartment building, I was Pelé, but as we all know, just as important as the images in your head is the image you portray to the world.

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