“Oh, Sir, just one more thing.”
– Lt. Columbo, LAPD

Whenever I’m alone at home, with Wife and Son and Daughter away somewhere, I watch an episode of Columbo, the show about Lt Columbo, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Because I own every single Columbo DVD box there is, I have a pretty good collection to choose from, and it’s just a matter of mood whether I want to go for one of the early 1970s cases, in which Peter Falk looks like he could still run after a bad guy if he wanted to, and in which his old Peugeot still looks mostly European, instead of just old, or a 1980s style Columbo.

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Every time people tell me that “it’s a small world..” when I know somebody they also know, my shtick is to finish their sentence with “… and Finland’s even smaller.” (When the person in question is Finnish, of course, I realize it doesn’t really work otherwise).

I see evidence of the smallness of Finland if not every day, then every week, or at least every month, on Facebook, when a friend of mine friends another friend of mine, and I didn’t know they were friends, too.

And then I go and “like” their friendship, a cyberversion of me putting my arms around them both and saying, “now, isn’t this fantastic?”

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So, I’m sitting at the Coffee & Co at the Laurinska street in the Bratislava Old Town. The sun is shining, the coffee is good, and the mind peaceful, so I just leaned back in my chair, and looked at the people walking past me. Many of them are tourists, most even, as always in all the Old Towns in all the world.

One of the people who just passed me was a big man in a beige jacket, blue jeans, blue sweater. He was wearing sunglasses like Jack Nicholson, and he had done some shopping. The big man walked like big men do, in long and heavy steps, as if he had to make an extra effort to beat the gravity with every step. But, as he walked by my table in the sun in just a few seconds, he also had a special jump to his step.

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Sometimes, when I’m standing around in the kitchen, waiting for the espresso machine to heat up, I see a common magpie land in our front yard. It’ll hop there, glance around, strut around with a swagger, looking all classy in black-and-white, like it’s walking on a red carpet on its way to a gala dinner.

Although, there’s something a little sneaky about it, too. It hops, looks around, as if to see if anybody is watching its every move.

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I wonder how many people an average person meets in his lifetime. I actually think about that quite often, when I’m on the subway, at the airport, or, like now, sitting at a coffee shop. And when I think about meeting people, I mean connecting, not just being in the same place at the same time.

For example, I haven’t really met that bald man in front me, even if we just had eye contact. (Then we both looked away). Those two women to my right, with their cool glasses and salads and scarfs, aren’t people I’ve met, in these official meetings statistics.

They could be.

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Even though I can’t order a croissant in Paris, and have practically never spoken Spanish with a Spanish-speaking person, I proudly list both French and Spanish under “language skills” on my resumé.

And why not, I had, after all, somehow passed my French exams in business school – the ones I quite literally slept through, forcing me to learn two year’s worth of French on my own – and even studied two years of Spanish at the same university. I do know the lyrics to “Besame Mucho”, and feel pretty good lip syncing to “La Bamba”. Yo no soy marinero.

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I got fired from my first job. I had fought long and hard to get it, finally landing a position that I hadn’t even applied for, getting hired just on being persistent. Having seen the scores of my interviews and psychological tests, the consultants had recommended hiring somebody else.

I knew that when I called the CEO a few nights later, while driving on the highway. We talked about the job, and my tests, and I remember telling him that I disagreed with the results because I knew I’d be great at the job. He agreed.

“I agree, those tests are a bunch of crock,” he said. “I like you.”

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A few blocks from the hospital where I was born, a few blocks, but the other way from the house where we lived when I was born, two blocks from where we lived when Son was born, and just around the corner from where my parents’ friends, and my sometime babysitters lived, there used to be a movie theater.

For decades now, in its place, there’s been a Pentecostal Church.

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A year before we moved, Dad had another job offer, and everything about it sounded nice, but we stayed put in Helsinki. I used to like to think that I had vetoed the move, but upon a few decades’ reflection, I’m not sure if I should be so proud of that – if it was true. But I just liked being where I was, playing hockey with the guys I knew, going to the school I had gone to with the same people I had known for the past six, seven years.

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