Saturday, November 30, 2013

we left our secrets by the Eiffel Tower

Once upon a time, a Finn, a Mexican-American and a Korean drifted around  the streets of Paris ...

They had spent the last few weeks drifting around a tiny French village, working and trying to learn French, watching TV and playing ping-pong in an attic room, eating fruit straight off the trees in the garden, feeding stray cats and taking long walks along the narrow country lanes between wheat fields and hamlets. There had been adventures as well: entering a field guarded by a hostile stallion, hiding in a ditch one dark night and spying on a crazy stranger, hitch-hiking to the next village which was rumoured to have a crêperie.

These were lazy summer days when the definition of happiness was to find a good plum tree, sit underneath it and eat its fruit while discussing typical dog names in different cultures. The Korean was in love with the Finn, the Finn was in love with life, the Mexican was in love with God.

And then, there was Paris, and their last days together. 

It was miles and miles of walking, giggling in the Louvre, having a picnic by Pont Neuf, trying on the most expensive perfumes on Champs d'Elysées, napping on the lawn at Versailles one hot afternoon, making new friends at the youth hostel, sneaking into government buildings just because they looked like palaces, discussing God at the altar of Sacré-Coeur, listening to jazz in Montmartre ...

The last night, a balmy August midnight, they sat in the darkness underneath the Eiffel tower. "Let's tell each other our darkest secrets," the Mexican said. "Because we will never see each other again."

So they did.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

in the hall of comfort and joy

A cave of warmth and sugar, the Kauppahalli  - market hall. My refuge on tired winter days when I need to escape the office for a while.

A good place to eat a tasty salad and people-watch, maybe stroll past a few of the stalls. As market halls go, it's tiny, but there are interesting things to see. Weird creatures of the sea in the fish-seller's display. Every kind of cheese known to man in the cheese stall - cranberry camembert, anyone? And oh, the temptation of Belgian truffel chocolates and dried strawberries!

If you venture past the food section, you can find boho clothes and healing crystals, but I'm usually content in a nook of the café. People stroll by at a leisurely pace, anyone from actors to old age pensioners. There is always someone you know and someone you wish you knew.

Just looking at the pink and yellow cupcakes under the golden light of the café counter raises my blood sugar to a pleasant level - I don't even have to eat one. The coffee is good and life is peaceful.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

waiting for the right kind of pilot

I walk the streets again, in the early twilight of November.

A sprinkling of snow on the pavement, dangerous patches of ice. The barking of two dogs playing in the park, owners trying to untangle their leashes. Windows lit by ugly lamps or pretty Christmas decorations. The cold biting my cheeks.

Around the market square in the town center, neon lights are shining and people are milling about, finishing up their Saturday shopping or getting ready for a night out. Restaurants are opening their doors to early diners and there is a wonderful smell of hot food everywhere.
In the shopping centre, they're playing Savage Garden:

She can't remember a time when she felt needed
If love was red then she was colour blind
All her friends they've been tried for treason
And crimes that were never defined
She's saying, "Love is like a barren place,
And reaching out for human faith is
Is like a journey I just don't have a map for"
So baby's gonna take a dive and
Push the shift to overdrive
Send a signal that she's hanging
All her hopes on the stars
What a pleasant dream 


Walking past the little pizza place where I go for take-out sometimes, I see the Turkish proprietor sweeping the floor. I imagine him wondering about me sometimes - the lonely woman who always orders just one single pizza to take home to an empty apartment on a Sunday afternoon. The sight of him deftly cutting slices off the kebab meat and giving instructions to his only employee, another middle-aged Turkish man, is always a comfort. He has a fatherly air about him, quiet and confident but unassuming, just doing his job and offering a warm smile to go with the pizza.

She's taking her time making up the reasons
To justify all the hurt inside
Guess she knows from the smile and the look in their eyes
Everyone's got a theory about the bitter one 


I bypass the pizza this time and instead order spring rolls from a little Vietnamese lady. On my way home I walk extremely slowly, the way I do when I need the world to slow down and give me time to really see it.

And I see so many beautiful things. A dark high-rise building with light in a single window, one on the top floor. Coloured lights. Lovers holding hands over candle-lit dinner tables. So much hope, and a life worth living.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

dancing away the oxygen

This year, I have learned to do  zumba  and I love it.

But there comes a moment towards the end of every zumba class when I'm really enjoying myself, life is beautiful and fun and filled with good music, and the zumba instructor puts on a slower song for the stretching session. Around that point in time, the poorly ventilated gym hall runs out of oxygen.

I struggle to do the stretching while battling nausea and dizziness. The song that plays at that moment? Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful", of course: Every day is so wonderful, then suddenly it's hard to breathe...

Sunday, November 17, 2013

lunch with the bee-eater

"Bet you don't know the Latin name of the bee-eater."

There is a challenge in my brother-in-law's voice. My sister and I, both language experts, grin at each other. We are having a laugh, making up names for a bird we've never heard of. My nephews roll their eyes and the dog puts his head on my lap as I absently stroke his whiskers. My mother smiles at us all, indulgently.
 
Sunday lunch with family. It wears me out, and it's the best thing that ever happens to me.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

should not be forgotten years

The hardest years, the darkest years
The roarin' years, the fallen years
These should not be forgotten years
The hardest years the wildest years
The desperate and divided years
...
Forsaking aching breaking years
The time 'n' tested heartbreak years
These should not be forgotten years 


( Midnight Oil: Forgotten Years )

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

a sleep so sound

Spent the whole night chasing a song in my dreams.

When I woke up, it was gone. There was only a tired buzz in my ears from having to get up to a grey November morning.

"Yet the Lord will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, 
and in the night his song shall be with me, 
and my prayer unto the God of my life."

(The Bible, Psalm 42:8)

Tuesday, November 05, 2013

writing between the lines, when you don't know how

Apparently, I'm  a writer of magic books.

These books, a.k.a. my old diaries, are for the most part horrendous and cringe-inducing and the utmost pinnacle of naiveté. But I have faithfully recorded my journey so far - which is lucky, as I seem to have forgotten most of it already ( and I'm not even that old ) - and when I pick up one of these diaries and read it, I am sometimes struck speechless.
I'm not sure if it's disbelief in how much I've forgotten of my adventures or doubts as to whether I've actually done those things or just made them up.

Did I actually, really, find a shop in Paris that sold live peacocks and skunks? Or see all the bicycles from the Tour de France pass by on a lorry? How did I forget these things?

And there is the case of the mysterious village ... I once lived in England for a while. I had ended up living in a particular village, tiny and largely unknown, completely by coincidence and had no recollection of ever having heard of its existence beforehand. Much later, I found that I had mentioned that village in my diaries. Not only once, but twice. Years before I went there. Creepy, yes?

I also seem to have a talent for writing very clearly about things to which I'm completely oblivious. Like the year I was frequently hanging out with an ex-boyfriend and feeling melancholic because I still had a thing for him but kept it to myself because he was not interested. That this was the factual state of affairs, I had no doubt at the time. Yet, in my old diary, where I wrote "he doesn't love me" and wrote about the way he looked at me and talked to me ... now I read the truth more clearly than that faded ink. The truth that he was desperately in love with me. Sad, yes?

No, I'm no writer of magic after all. But I see this as proof that there is more to life than just coincidence and randomness. A beautiful symmetry, the Creator's plan. And yes, it was in that plan that I not end up with that boy - this it also clear to me now.

However, if I read this in five or ten years, a completely different truth may be screaming at me from behind these words.

Sunday, November 03, 2013

weekend of the dead

Followed the old Finnish All Saints' Day tradition of lighting candles on family graves. At dusk, the cemetery was an entire universe of burning lights and peace of mind.

Then walked through town and observed the newish, American import tradition of Halloween, which here manifests as people dressing up as monsters or zombies and going to parties. I almost fainted when I encountered a young man drenched in blood. He cheerily wished me a happy Halloween.

Friday, November 01, 2013

Manhattan may be a myth

  'What do I do now?' I asked him, helpless not to turn to the authority before me, the father we dream of in joy and fear.
  'Go back to a city that needs you.'
  'You mean, Manhattan?'
  'No one disputes your place here. You own your apartment outright, don't you? I understand it has a fine view.'
  If I stayed a moment longer Arnheim might describe those birds and that tower, my heart's last sacred quadrant of sky. I fled into the night and snow before I could hear it.

I don't like books that are weird. So I tried to put down Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City. But I couldn't because it mesmerised me. And it is thick and heavy. So now I hobble around with injuries - because I strained my hand and lost my heart.