Unlike Groucho Marx, I’d be happy to get into a club that would have people like me as a member. As a kid, I started numerous clubs, and always designed membership cards for each of them: Tarzan club, Pecos Bill club, Tex Willer club, and Woody Woodpecker club. They were ultimate anti-Groucho Marx clubs, because most of them had just one member: me.

I didn’t care about not having any other members in my clubs, that wasn’t the point anyway. The point was the card, the official badge that I could flash whenever I felt like it. The cards had my name, my membership number – “1” – and the club logo on them, often “a stamp” of the main authority. Me.

To me, a business card is another club membership card. It tells other people that “This is my team” and “I’m with these guys”. As a kid, I would often take a stack of Dad’s business cards, scratch off his first name, and write my own in its place instead to make the cards my own.

The first thing I did when Wife and I decided to start up this little company of ours was to design a business card for myself. Then we launched a hockey magazine so we had to, obviously, make press ID cards. That club had two members: me and a designer friend.

My junior year in college, Dad gave me a boxy thing for Christmas. The year before, my parents had given me a portable CD player, but this time, inside the wrapping, there was an old book. A really old book.

“Thanks, um, it looks really … old,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, well, I thought that since you like to read, maybe you’d like to get acquainted with some old Finnish literature,” he said.

I was about to toss the book away, but being the good son that I am, I thought I’d show Dad that I appreciated his gift and I opened the book. Inside, Dad had carved a little hole, and in the hole, there was a stack of business cards, with my name – printed – on them.

Again, the club had just one member. Me.

I was 12 when I got a bus pass. My library card was about five years old at that time and it had served me well. I didn’t have an identification card back then so I used to show my library card to people, hoping that my license to loan books was enough to make them trust me. Getting the bus pass was a much bigger thing, though.

I didn’t really need a bus pass since we lived just some 600 meters from the school. The bus stop was about 150 meters from our house, and the stop that I had to get off at was about the same 150 meters from the school, so basically, the bus pass was just for me to have a reason to stand at the bus stop.

Unlike the library card, the bus pass also had my photo, and my date of birth, so it was almost a real ID card. Except that, for months, I had Wayne Gretzky’s photo over my own. Also, I used to keep it inside my jacket so that when I’d show it to the bus driver, I could flash it simply by opening my jacket, just like the detectives on TV.

It was a big thing because, besides being a pass to ride the buses and trains – and obviously an access card to fantasy land – having a bus pass also made me feel like an integral part of the society, like a real person making real decisions. I was being admitted to the big club of adults.

Also, only tourists buy single tickets, so it made me feel like a true Helsinkian, just like buying a monthly pass in Oxford made me feel like a local there. Buying a MetroCard in New York still makes me walk a little faster when I get back up from the subway. You know, like a real New Yorker.

Son got his first bus pass today. He was happy, so happy, almost delirious of happiness. And who can blame him.

Welcome to the club, kid.