Official announcement from the office of Risto Pakarinen: I am the new new renaissance man of the 21st century, the kind who can’t do anything. By “do” I mean fix things, plant anything, or make any visible – constructive, literally – changes in my surroundings.
But I can play ball.
Being the President of Finland still seems to have some pull. Yesterday, H, the boy genius – both self-proclaimed and encouraged by parents – surprised me right in the middle of a nice bike ride to the grocery store.
Our family is bilingual, and since I write a lot in English, I switch between three languages all the time, every day. Every language is special in its own way, and each of them portray my personality in a slightly different way.
Even my voice is a little different depending on whether I’m speaking Finnish, Swedish, or English, let alone the style of my speech. A good American friend of mine once noted that while he was getting more fluent in Swedish while living in Stockholm, he always counted money in English. I seem to be doing the same, only, I count in Finnish.
Seems to me that life is a chain of small races, competitions. I’m sure there are people out there who don’t care about competing that much, and who are happy just to participate, but I’m not one of them.
“Hejdå, good old apartment, thanks for everything,” I said, and if you had been standing where J was, you would have heard what she heard: that my voice did crack a little. When J took a step back inside she saw the same thing I saw, looking at her: A tiny little tear in the corner of the eye.
Today I learned that sometimes just a small change can turn an ordinary thing into a very funny one when my son, the bilingual genius, accidentally turned the word “eyebrows” into “broweyes”.
I also learned that sometimes even the funniest things don’t translate very well from Finnish into English.
Sitting at the real estate agent’s office today, the nice lady selling her old house to us was telling us what a pain it was to move. But that, fortunately, she hadn’t had to do that very often. That’s when my wife jumped in with the facts*.
(* Still unverified).
Just to let you know: I finished both Monday’s and Tuesday’s crosswords this week. And correctly, too, not filling the blanks with random letters – like I’m known to have done in the past.
Filed under “true story”.
Music can transcend time and place like nothing else (except apparently smell). Hearing a song can bring back memories that you didn’t know you even had. And then make you wonder why you have them.
Here are my two examples. Except I know.
Four weeks ago, I was sitting in the same chair I am sitting in now, writing an article, when I once again looked at the Bobby Orr photo hanging on the wall in front of me. It’s funny that the photo is such an inspiration, even if I never saw the game, didn’t grow up idolizing Orr, and don’t really know that much about that particular final series.
