Right now, if I lift my eyes off the screen and stop typing this, I’ll see one of the most beautiful views over Helsinki. I’m sitting at an outside café on a hill, overlooking the bay, with the National opera, the Finlandia Hall, the National museum, the House of Parliament, the museum of modern art, and my old gym to my right.
And one lonesome swan slowly swimming across the bay from north to south.
Had they not rebuilt the Joensuu rink the way they have, I’d be able to show you exactly where I was when I realized I wasn’t going to become a hockey star, down to an inch. It was the middle of the night, and my team had just got back from a road trip to the west coast of Finland. I had probably not played a lot so for me, it had mostly been a 12-hour bus ride across Finland, with Twisted Sister playing in my Walkman.
I got my hockey bag from the trunk of the bus, and as I lifted it on my shoulder and started to walk towards the arena entrance. And that’s where it finally dawned on me. I wasn’t going to be the next Gretzky, or even Matti Forss, my big idol in the Finnish league.
I lay in the backseat of our car, seemingly sleeping, but secretly eavesdropping on my parents’ conversation in front. Back then, kids could do that, and I usually sat in the back, on my knees on the hump that runs through the middle of the car, but my head between the two front seats – if I wasn’t reading comics, that is.
We were on our way home from my aunt’s place just outside Helsinki. We didn’t visit her often, and I didn’t really know her, which made me dread those trips a little, but that one time I almost didn’t want to go home, because in the back of her yard, behind a chicken netting fence, my aunt had a half a dozen German shepherd puppies.
Tonight, I went to the gym wearing my brand new Paris Saint-Germain football team’s hat. Well, its not technically just mine, but Daughter’s and mine. We bought that one, and a Gryffindor hat from the Warner Brothers studios’ Harry Potter Tour in London last week, and the deal is that we’re co-owners of those hats. We both can wear those hats.
As I walked up the stairs to the gym, I saw a dude say something to me. I didn’t hear him, because I was listening to a hockey podcast, but when I saw that he said something to me again, I took the earphones out of my ears and said – as politely as I could – “What?”
Aah, it’s springtime in Paris. It’s a little chilly, yes, but the sun has just come out, we’ve just wandered through and around the Louvre, and have seen the Mona Lisa, and we’re just enjoying being right here, right now, with the Seine in front of us, and farther down the river, the Eiffel tower looming large over the city.
Wife is a couple of steps in front of me, Son and Daughter just behind me, when suddenly an old lady crouches in front of us and picks something from the ground. I don’t see her at first – because I’m taking photos – but when I almost bump into her, I take notice.
“Is this yours?” she asks, and shows me a gold ring.
Tässä Leijonat-lehdessä ilmestynyt juttu Veli-Pekka Ketolasta:
Another March day. The sun is shining, after some light snowfall. The snow in spring is so light it looks fake.
“It’s like the snow in the movies,” said Wife when she took off with Son and Daughter this morning.
I waved to them from the front door, until I saw Son’s red hat disappear behind the garage. I closed the door, packed my bag and went to the gym because while you can make a change any given day, sometimes you have to keep doing the same thing over and over again to really make a change.
For about six years, I’ve had a theory about what makes certain people sleepyheads, and what makes others get up early – way too early – in the morning. For my research, I have used human guinea pigs.
Exhibit A, “Son”, gets up at the crack of dawn and refuses to go back to sleep, fearing that he will miss something while asleep. What that might be is a topic for another study for which I don’t have funding yet.
Exhibit B, “Daughter”, refuses to get up at all, kicking and screaming everybody and everything within, well, a kicking distance from her bed. Once up, though, all sunshine.
“Son” was born in the middle of the night, 2.58 am, and “Daughter” in the evening, at 6.30 pm.
Erik Haag and Lotta Lundgren went time traveling and spent time in the 18th and 19th century, in the 1940s, and the 1970s. They didn’t use a DeLorean. They used food.
Maybe this is the last year we all walk around carrying takeaway coffee cups, sipping our lattes, and using coffee shops as our offices away from our home offices. It doesn’t seem likely, but surely there must come a time when our nutritional habits have changed so much that even an idea of somebody eating on the run seems odd, let alone that they would carry hot, addictive liquids with them.
“Food is culture,” says Lotta Lundgren, a Swedish food writer, and one of the two stars of Historieätarna, a TV show about Swedish food – and culture – in different eras.
And since food is culture, it’s apt to change.
According to a Finnish proverb, “if sauna, tar and booze don’t cure the disease, it’ll kill you”. I’ve never had to try all three to feel better, so I’ve always simply assumed it to be true, which is why I keep spreading the words of wisdom to Wife, and Son and Daughter.
Fortunately, those three aren’t at the top of the list of cures in our household. Fortunately, because we haven’t been sick very often, and because I’m not sure how to use tar as medicine.
Anyway, at the first signs of a cold I turn to another holy trinity.
