For the next three weeks, I’ll be in Helsinki, Finland, to cover the hockey world championships. It’ll be my longest stay in my hometown since 2004 when Wife and I moved back to Stockholm after a two-year stint as a Swedish-Finnish couple in Finland.
I was born in Helsinki, I started school there, I went to university there, and I got my first real job there. I’ve also moved out of Helsinki four times.
My grandmother liked to talk about death a lot. The turning of time seemed to be very much present in her life, and in her relationship with everybody, including her grandkids. One of her favorite topics, as it related to death, was the inheritance.
When I was about ten years old, I fell in love with a brown, leather coin purse of hers. I played with it, opened and closed it, put it in my pocket, pulled it back out again, feeling very cool. My Grandma watched me play with it, and she asked me if I liked it. I did, I told her.
“Risto, I’ll give that to you. As an advance inheritance. So when I die, you can tell the others that I gave that to you, and that it’s yours,” she told me.
I saw this photo (below) on Twitter, and sent a link to a buddy who then reminded me of a blog entry I wrote about Shanahan six years ago for the nhl.com. So I went and dug it up. Here it is:
Shanahan The Man
As you’ve probably already seen, Rangers forward Brendan Shanahan was named the inaugural winner of the Mark Messier Leadership Award this week.
Brendan Shanahan truly is a leader. He stands out from the crowd. He’s different. He’s smart, he’s a great athlete, he’s rich, he’s famous, he’s got it all. When he gives interviews, he actually answers the questions he’s asked. He looks the interviewer in the eye and delivers his thoughts in a careful manner. He’s tall, he’s dark and, yes, he’s handsome.
You know, I was thinking…
“It’s obviously more important that Israel survive, you know, than probably some other random set of six million people elsewhere survive.”
– David Plotz, Slate’s “Political Gabfest”, April 20, 2012
Ahem…
Over here? No, not Israel, look a little further north. A little more. Here, in Europe. Just go straight north from Israel and when you hit the Arctic Ocean, look to the west. See? Just another random set of 5,363,624 people.
That’s right. Finland.
HELSINKI – Of all the skills that Mikael Granlund has, and of all the gifts he has, the ability to be in the moment, to live in the now, may just be his biggest, and the most important one.
That’s why he was able to hone his stickhandling skills for hours on end as a kid. That’s what’s helped him keep his feet on the ground during the media frenzy around him the last few years, and that’s why it’s easy to believe him when he says that he hasn’t thought about playing in front of his home fans at the World Championship in May.
After all, Mikael Granlund says that when he’s in the zone, he doesn’t even remember his last shift, and doesn’t hear what the crowd’s yelling, or what the other players are saying to him on the ice.
The best part of spring – which has definitely sprung here now – is putting the winter clothes away, and brining the summer clothes back into rotation. Not only are there always some nice surprises, jackets you’ve forgot, there’s often the added bonus of finding money in the pockets.
And that, I say, feels like winning the lottery.
“Just take it from the top, read it through to get a feel, and you know, remember that you’re partly thinking about this out loud, but that there’s also an audience out there so you have to make sure you reach them,” said the producer.
I nodded, and pulled the microphone a little closer to my face. I leaned on the desk with both my hands, and stared at my script in front of me.
“Anytime you wanna go, just go,” he said.
My idea of a perfect afternoon is going for a bike ride with the family. We all get on our bikes, and before we take off, one of us raises his or her right hand and yells, “Let’s ride!” You know, like the Three Amigos did in the movie.
And then we ride to the mall or the library – next to the mall – or to a nearby park. The bike rides don’t take an entire afternoon yet, but by the end of the summer, we might even make it all the way to downtown Stockholm. With a couple of stops to eat our sandwiches, of course.
Before the weekend hockey trip that turned me into a fan of a Finnish new wave band, and before I started to grow my hair long, accordingly, but after my favorite band was Alvin and the Chipmunks, I got into rockabilly. Of course I wasn’t alone in this, because that was an era when the 1950s came back in style.
Even Elvis was still alive, although, at that point, I was basically still rocking to the sounds of a chipmunk band, and loving it. I caught the trend a couple of years after his death when a friend of mine and I saw Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s movie on Elvis. And we thought Kurt Russell was perfect as Elvis, but then again, we already knew Kurt was cool, because The Quest, a TV show, had been a big hit in Finland.
