“Hockey is simply the best sport out there. This coming from someone who did not grow up with hockey (Miami Beach is not exactly your hockey Mecca). I place being at Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals and watching Dave Andreychuk lift Stanley over his head just beneath the birth of my children!”
– Cookie, May 27, 2007

The kids thought it was a little funny that we’d be visiting somebody named Cookie, or “Kakan” as Son called her, translating “cookie” into Swedish. Wife and I thought it was a little exciting, almost a little wild, to make travel plans to Florida and include in them a night at a complete stranger’s house, even if she is a retired school teacher, and a redhead named Cookie.

Of course, Cookie wasn’t really a stranger, she was just somebody we had never met. After all, I had been emailing with her since that first message in May 2007 which she sent as a reply to a blog post of mine on NHL.com. And, we’re Facebook friends.

Over the last five years, she had sent us hats and posters, and her favorite children’s book – “The Giving Tree” – and I had helped her write signs in Finnish and Swedish and I, too, had sent her books (of mine that she had bought, but still), and in the process, we had become friends.

And of course, we did know that she was a hockey fan.

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A couple of weeks ago, when we were out skating, I saw a group of middle-aged men play a game of shinny at one end of the big ice. What really caught my eye was the fact that they all, every one one of them, wore helmets.

Back in the 1980s when I was a kid, people wore just cool sweaters, and nobody wore a helmet playing shinny.

We didn’t wear helmets when we went sledding, or skating, or for bike rides, either.

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One winter day nine years ago, I walked four blocks from our apartment to the restaurant where I was supposed to meet a young Finnish hockey player named Tuomo Ruutu. He was 20, had just turned 20, and he was one of the most-sought after prospects in Europe. He played for Helsinki IFK, but had been drafted by the Chicago Blackhawks in the first round, ninth overall in 2001, and he was expected to sign with the team and leave Finland after the season.

I was meeting him for an interview, but not just any old interview. It was my first assignment for The Hockey News, (one of) the most respected hockey publication(s) in the world.

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Yesterday, on my way to the gym, I thought I saw a 50-krona bill in the snow on the pavement. I stopped to check – of course – and realized that it was, indeed, a mustard yellow bill with the singer Jenny Lind on it. I quickly picked it up, and then, before slipping it inside my red mitten, I looked to my left and to my right, to see if somebody was watching me.

I’d like to say I did so to find the poor old lady who had dropped it so I could return it, but that was my second thought. That did come before “I can’t believe my luck!” My first thought, though, was: Who’s pulling my leg?

Now, I’m a joker. I sometimes tell a joke, although I can’t seem to remember very many of them at the same time so I mostly do puns, wordplay, and sarcasm. In fact, I monitor my development in Swedish by seeing Wife’s reactions to my puns. Ten years ago, she used to say she’d heard my puns before. In third grade. These days, I seem to be making 7th grade puns.

My Dad, on the other hand, is a prankster. He’s the kind of guy who hides eggs in other people’s pockets, or sticks pepper inside a chocolate bar.

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Last week, just as I was about to make a long-distance Skype to America, my laptop quietly died. Well, before it died, it froze, and went into a coma. I don’t know if it could hear me, but it didn’t react to anything I did. Not mouse movements, not my tapping on the keys, not even Escape.

I had to switch it off and have it examined.

Two days later I got a call. The man had some good news and some bad news. The bad news was that the hard drive had, indeed, died. The good news was that they were able to retrieve the data.

“I’ll put a folder called ‘backup’ on your new disk then,” said the man with the message.

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When I first moved to Sweden, I was more than shy to speak Swedish. For a non-Finn that may have seemed a little strange, since I had seven years of Swedish studies – with good grades – under my belt, and I had translated hockey magazines from Norwegian and Swedish into Finnish. And yes, I could read the papers, watch the late night news on TV, and every now and then, I would even send an email in Swedish to my colleagues.

But every Finn knows how difficult it is for us to speak Swedish. Partly because the Finnish accent always gives us away – and Finns would like nothing better than to blend in – and partly because while that fantastic educational system did teach us Swedish grammar, it didn’t teach us how to speak.

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Even before my father had uttered a word, I knew what he was going to say next. I had heard it before, and always in a voice about two octaves lower than his own because that’s the tone he had heard it in the first time, some 30 years ago.

We were at a hockey game, when I mentioned to him that I’d be going to Turku to interview Juuso Wahlsten. As soon as “Wahlsten” had left my lips, I saw the twinkle in Dad’s eyes, the lightbulb over his head, just like I had seen many times before over the years.

“It’s not every day you see a junior team play such good hockey,” Dad said.

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I’ve never understood why John Lennon would sing “another year over and a new one just begun” in a Christmas song. There’s still a week between Xmas and New Year’s and anything can happen.

For example, six years ago, Wife didn’t have any idea on Xmas Eve that a week later I’d propose to her.

Twelve years ago, we wished each other merry Xmas and a happy new year a couple of days before Xmas Eve because I spent that one in Finland, and wasn’t sure if I’d be back for her New Year’s party.

But I decided to come back because I wanted to be with her. That much I knew then, and that much I know now. Everything else has just happened.

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