I was exactly where I wanted to be. I repeat: exactly where I wanted to be. I wasn’t in front of everybody because if you’re in front, it’s easy to start looking back. When there’s nowhere to focus on in front of you, you tend to take off too fast, and use too much energy in the beginning.
Some people prefer to run in the middle of the pack, because they feel the power of the crowd carrying them on, and I suppose they feel safe in the middle, when the masses begin to stampede.
I don’t.
FADE IN.
EXT. A small yellow car is driving on a long city street. On one side of the street, there is a river, on the other, some small houses.
INT. Zooming in, we see two young men inside the car.
On my first day of work in Sweden, 13 years, 6 months, and 22 days ago, I took the subway from my apartment, a place that a friend of a new colleague let me use for a couple of weeks while I was looking for a place of my own, and I headed downtown.
I had only lived in Stockholm for five days, and had mostly just walked around the neighbourhood – and accumulated parking tickets right outside my apartment building.
I got on the red subway line towards downtown, and sat down reading a book, like a real Stockholmer. And then, as the subway train got closer to the Old Town where the office was, I … well, I panicked. I got off at a stop that was just before the Old Town, foolishly thinking that it would be faster to walk from there than to walk from the actual Old Town stop.
In April 1917, when the Russian Bolshevik leader Lenin traveled through Stockholm, the Swedish Communists Ture Nerman and Fredrik Ström took their comrade to PUB where they bought him a new suit so he would look good coming back to Russia.
– Wikipedia
Hundreds of thousands of Finns travel to Stockholm each year, most of them on one of the two ferry lines that have their ships go back and forth the two capitals – Helsinki and Stockholm – and one former capital – Turku, Finland.
A couple of weeks ago, I found the local hockey club’s new magazine in our mailbox. Our Sollentuna Hockey is a tiny club, with a men’s team in the fourth highest division in Sweden, but it’s also one that is proud to have Mats Sundin as an alumnus. For the first issue they had even got an interview with the man himself.
That, naturally, pulled me in, and as I read the story at the breakfast table, I mumbled that I probably should go watch their games and support the local club. And that maybe Son would like to tag along.
“No, no, I’m not interested in such a violent sport,” said Son from across the table without looking up from his comic book.
In my first year of college, I spent most of the weekends at my Grandma’s little place a half hour north of Helsinki. Well, I actually drove up and spent most of the weekends with my cousins, my uncle’s kids, who shared their yard with Grandma and Grandpa.
They were – are – just a couple of years younger, so e had a lot of fun doing stuff that Grandma and Grandpa probably wouldn’t have wanted to do. I say “probably” because we never asked them if they wanted to come out and go ice skating on the gravel road in the winter, or watch MTV or old TV shows on VHS, or drive up to the sports field and kick a soccer ball with us.
And when it was time to go to bed, we didn’t ask them if they, too, wanted to lie in the dark, listen to music, and crack silly jokes – but then again, by then, they had been asleep for five, six hours.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, I happened to be in the audience when three Finnish NHL players held a press conference about their game later that week in Helsinki, Finland. The Anaheim Ducks players were on the podium, in their impressive looking suits that they’re required to wear as stipulated in the Exhibit 14, Paragraph 5 of the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ association.
While listening to them, I happened to notice that two of them were wearing very impressive looking watches on their arms.
How hungry am I? Well, I just had a cup of coffee, and then I ate the styrofoam cup. That didn’t help.
I’ve only had breakfast today. It was a good, big Scandinavian hotel breakfast, sure, with scrambled eggs, German wurst, two sandwiches, a croissant, and a cappuccino, but it was eight hours ago.
The reason why I haven’t eaten anything all day is that I’ve been working as a reporter, covering a visiting NHL team in Helsinki: watching their practices, and waiting for the players to come out of their dressing room to face people like me. And right now, I’ve been standing in the corridor outside their room for 50 minutes.
I can see the McDonald’s golden arches on a rooftop on the other side of the bay from my hotel room. I can also see the big white cathedral, the national museum, and the Hesperia park and the trees around it turning red and yellow. Down below, green trams are going up and down Mannerheimintie, the five and a half kilometers long main street that begins from Erottaja, the most expensive lot in the Finnish version of Monopoly, and turns into highway 3 in the north end.
The McDonald’s sign may have been there 17 years ago, I’m not sure, but I don’t think it was. Neither was the Helsinki Music Centre, or the glass cube which is home to Sanoma, a major Finnish media house.
Mostly, the view over Helsinki looks exactly like it did in 1994 when the NHL took brought Teemu Selänne’s Winnipeg Jets came to town to show how things were done in North America.
Sometimes, late at night, when the neighbourhood is quiet, and even the teenagers with the mopeds have gone to bed, I wake up. It’s the silence that wakes me up, but when I sit up, and listen, I can hear a long, whining sound in the distance.
And I laugh.
