Off the top of my head, I can think of five races that I’ve run in. The first one a 60-meter dash in fourth grade, the second a three-kilometer race a couple of years later, the third a 100-meter race in high school, the fourth a 5-kilometer run in Harbor Beach, Michigan, the year after, and the fifth,a relay in my second year in business school.

I was never a great runner. I like to remember that I made it to semifinal in that first race and I also tell the kids I ran in the final in the high school 100-meter race.

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Next to my bed, under the nightstand, and under a stack of books that I’d like to have read already, there’s a little basket for things that don’t have a place anywhere else: an Oscar Wilde book, a pair of socks, some comic books, old issues of Wired and New Yorker, a baseball hat, and a sweatband.

And then there’s a copy of R.M. Ballantyne’s “The Coral Island”, a book that I read a dozen times as a boy. Every once in a while I take it up and ask Son if he’d like to read it, but so far, Harry Potter and the Three Detectives have always pulled him stronger.

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I’ve always liked the Helsinki airport. Back in the olden days, when I was a wide-eyed boy – instead of this wide-eyed man I’ve become – the airport was one of the family’s favorite Sunday afternoon drive destinations. Back then, the planes took off and landed right in front of the main terminal, and kids, like myself, even got to climb all the way to the window to see them go up and down.

There was nothing more exciting than to hear my dad say on a Sunday afternoon:

“Wanna go see some planes?”

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The most super of all the superheroes I’ve liked is the one who isn’t even a superhero, but instead, just your regular noble man, born in the deepest jungles of Africa, then adopted by apes after the same apes killed his parents.

Tarzan.

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Last night, Son was playing with his Nintendo, recording sounds and then altering them to make them funny, and he asked me to say something.

I thought about it for a second, and then said, “Are you a Finn? I’m a Finn, too.” But I said it in a gruffy voice.

“Perfect!” said Son, and laughed so hard he almost fell on the floor.

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Often, when I try to explain something to a friend or Wife, I find myself drawing analogies to hockey. It seems like such a simple way to make sense of the world. Not that it always is that, like when I try to explain the euro crisis drawing parallels to no-touch icing, but sometimes it is.

A hockey rink is a miniature version of the world – because there’s a mix of all kinds of people, and, hey, we are the world.

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