Maybe it was because my father had been a good Finnish baseball player, and had even been on the winning team of an all-Finland sports camp back in the day, or maybe it was just because I was pretty good at catching the ball in pesäpallo, but I always thought I’d be great at baseball.
So when a teammate once told me after a hockey practice that he played baseball in the Finnish league, I said I wanted to play, too.
It may be the Finn in me, but I seem to take missions seriously. Well, mission is too grand a word, really, when I mean favors people ask me and tasks they ask me to do. If somebody suggests getting a cup of coffee “tomorrow”, I hold my day free from other engagements. If I’m asked to find a good restaurant to have dinner at in Helsinki, I ask around and try to find the best one.
And if somebody asks me to deliver three golf shirts to some hockey people when I go on vacation in Vancouver, I deliver those shirts no matter what.
Let’s start with a fact. I am officially 170 centimeters tall. I don’t know what that is in feet and inches, but whatever it is, it’s below the average in most Western countries. It is the average height for males in Brazil, and above the average in countries like Bahrain, Chile, and Gambia. In Indonesia, where the average height for males is 1.58, I would be considered tall.
(Seriously, Google tells me I’m 5 feet and 6 inches and fifty-nine-sixty-fourths tall.)
For the next three weeks, I’ll be in Helsinki, Finland, to cover the hockey world championships. It’ll be my longest stay in my hometown since 2004 when Wife and I moved back to Stockholm after a two-year stint as a Swedish-Finnish couple in Finland.
I was born in Helsinki, I started school there, I went to university there, and I got my first real job there. I’ve also moved out of Helsinki four times.
My grandmother liked to talk about death a lot. The turning of time seemed to be very much present in her life, and in her relationship with everybody, including her grandkids. One of her favorite topics, as it related to death, was the inheritance.
When I was about ten years old, I fell in love with a brown, leather coin purse of hers. I played with it, opened and closed it, put it in my pocket, pulled it back out again, feeling very cool. My Grandma watched me play with it, and she asked me if I liked it. I did, I told her.
“Risto, I’ll give that to you. As an advance inheritance. So when I die, you can tell the others that I gave that to you, and that it’s yours,” she told me.
The best part of spring – which has definitely sprung here now – is putting the winter clothes away, and brining the summer clothes back into rotation. Not only are there always some nice surprises, jackets you’ve forgot, there’s often the added bonus of finding money in the pockets.
And that, I say, feels like winning the lottery.
“Just take it from the top, read it through to get a feel, and you know, remember that you’re partly thinking about this out loud, but that there’s also an audience out there so you have to make sure you reach them,” said the producer.
I nodded, and pulled the microphone a little closer to my face. I leaned on the desk with both my hands, and stared at my script in front of me.
“Anytime you wanna go, just go,” he said.
My idea of a perfect afternoon is going for a bike ride with the family. We all get on our bikes, and before we take off, one of us raises his or her right hand and yells, “Let’s ride!” You know, like the Three Amigos did in the movie.
And then we ride to the mall or the library – next to the mall – or to a nearby park. The bike rides don’t take an entire afternoon yet, but by the end of the summer, we might even make it all the way to downtown Stockholm. With a couple of stops to eat our sandwiches, of course.
Before the weekend hockey trip that turned me into a fan of a Finnish new wave band, and before I started to grow my hair long, accordingly, but after my favorite band was Alvin and the Chipmunks, I got into rockabilly. Of course I wasn’t alone in this, because that was an era when the 1950s came back in style.
Even Elvis was still alive, although, at that point, I was basically still rocking to the sounds of a chipmunk band, and loving it. I caught the trend a couple of years after his death when a friend of mine and I saw Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s movie on Elvis. And we thought Kurt Russell was perfect as Elvis, but then again, we already knew Kurt was cool, because The Quest, a TV show, had been a big hit in Finland.
FADE IN.
INT. CAR – EVENING. RISTO’S driving on a highway, SON sitting in the backseat, playing Angry Birds on RISTO’S iPhone. The radio’s on, playing Ulrik Munther’s “Soldiers”.
RISTO cranks up the volume.
