“I hate luck!”
– Son
We all hate luck when it works against us, don’t we? In Son’s case, the luck he so much despised was the wind in my sails as I moved my two knights into a striking position, about to kill his king in our friendly Easter holiday afternoon game of chess.
Of all the holidays in all the towns in all the world, Easter is my least favorite one.
It’s not a bad holiday, I have nothing against it, I just don’t have a relationship with it. Our family wasn’t big on eating lamb, I’ve never been out begging for candy dressed as a witch, and … that’s all I know about Easter traditions.
I have no special Easter memories, no Easter trip stories, no crazy relatives that always turned up at Easter. Besides, since Easter always closed all the stores and restaurants in Finland when I was a kid, the only fun thing it ever brought was mämmi, and while the 16th century traditional Finnish dessert was and is a treat, it wasn’t, and isn’t, enough.
However, today we returned the Santa Claus kit – the beard, the boots, the overcoat – to Wife’s parents, the Keepers of the Mask – a nice connection between the two big, religious holidays.
“I don’t think driving five hours a day for weeks would be fun. You’re the one who loves to drive.”
– Wife, over dinner, talking about vacation plans
I heard somebody say recently, in the aftermath of the restructuring of the American and Swedish auto industries that he felt that having a domestic auto industry was one of the signs of a nation being a true industrial power. I can’t remember who it was, or the actual phrase he used, but I know I heard it in my car, driving to an interview about an hour from my office.
I also remember thinking that the man had a point.
After all, the Americans had their big old cars, the Cadillacs, Fords, Chevrolets; the Germans had their Audis, Volkswagens, Opels; the Brits the Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Aston Martins, Jaguars; the Italians the Ferraris, the FIATs, Alfa Romeos, Lancias; and, of course, the Swedes Volvos and Saabs.
“Dad, can we play that things-that-didn’t-exist-when-you-were-a-kid game again?”
– Son, from the backseat, yesterday
Oh, where to begin. Of course we didn’t have cell phones, flat screen TVs – color TVs, actually – remote controls, shoes with Velcro instead of laces, and in the words of a 4331-member strong Facebook group, “When I was your age, hockey bags didn’t have [bleeping] wheels on them”.
There were no Crocs, no CDs, no DVDs, no Euros, no toy Kalashnikovs, and no Star Wars Lego merchandise. We did have clogs, and VHS, and my father used to make wooden pistols, and leather holsters for me.
A friend of mine was in Paris for the first time last week, and fell completely in love with the City of Light. Understandable, as it is one cool city, with the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Seine, and the rest of it.
Like London, Paris is way too cool and way too close for us to not go there every year. It’s right there, a two-hour flight, and well, even if my French isn’t what it used to be – those two years of French I slept through, literally, at college, have been reduced to a funny anecdote – I hear the French speak English these days.
The characters in Enid Blyton’s The Five Find-Outers and Dog series (and Blyton’s Famous Five and the Secret Seven series and all the other detective books, like the Three Investigators, or the Girl Detective, all very popular at the Oulunkylä Public School library) always found things. They found something that got them started on a case, and they found stuff during the case.
To find something on the street has always fascinated me. Finding something requires more than just luck. Not a lot more, but a little. You have to be alert enough to see that something, and not too lazy to leave it lying there.
Gentlemen,
Welcome back to our humble home. It’s not always this humble, but ever since the tiny water damage in the upstairs bathroom, we’ve had to make some adjustments.
Make yourself at home, while you’re renovating ours. He he. A little joke there. What’s a little lighthearted banter among friends, right? I really feel like I’ve gotten to know you during the four months it’s taken you to put back the tiles in our eight-square-meter bathroom.
The Fantastic Four, also known as Family, walked slowly through the shopping mall, towards the bus stop. Wife carried the backpack with all the food we had just bought, I had a loaf of bread in my hand – a miscalculation, yes –, Son was 50 meters ahead of Wife and me, Daughter was examining something 50 meters behind us.
Hey man,
Anybody ever tell you that you look like a lot of people? Not sure what it is, maybe the fact that you’re kind of chubby, but not, in the Colin Firth kind of way, and your hair’s long, but short, and curly but straight, and when you hide behind a magazine like that, you really have just yourself to blame if somebody mistakes you for another person.
“I have a little game I play in my head. Often when I’ve pitched a project or sent a job application, or something similar, I got to the gym to work all the anxieties out of my body. I send my thoughts, all my stuff into the ether, then pull back and let the universe work its magic on me.”
