We’ve been back in Duluth two-and-a-half months. I was never sure if I would or should write a post-script upon returning to Minnesota. I thought, you know, the comparative narrative would kind of be over once we left. But then again, neither America nor Finland are the same places they were pre-Covid.
Taavi and a friend watching fireworks from the rocks at my mom and dad's house on the 4th of July.
I almost reactively wrote one a few days after being back, but I’ve learned as I’ve aged, that allowing experiences some time to settle, almost always yields a clearer picture of what might be closest to true. I didn’t want that incident to be the only backdrop to a return, though I think any post script still must start there.
The incident itself was a bit shocking as a public interaction. In the moments after it happened, it felt like it could be used as “proof” that things had become unhinged here. I’m not sure that would be either true nor false, but it was at least a little surprising. So I gave it some time to settle.
It was only about four or five days back in Duluth. I was already back to work, and my hunger urges were still following a rhythm eight hours later than the days I was living.
About a quarter after eleven in the morning--7:15 pm Finnish time--I was powerful hungry and got a hankering for a burrito. The luxury of being a 3-minute drive from a solid $9 burrito at Q-doba was still a bit of novelty. I arrived at Q-doba about 11:25 to find out via taped sign on the door that, due to a shortage of staff, they would open at 11:30 that day. That was already new territory for me. Short-staffed? A Q-doba?
Not more than a minute later, a middle-aged woman, along with what I’d assume was her middle-aged husband, partner, or boyfriend, and a younger man likely to be about an adult son in his late 20s, came to the door and read the note. She gasped incredulously something akin to “oh, GREAT!” Though I’m not sure that’s verbatim. It felt a little dramatic considering we were 5 minutes from opening, and it’s just a chain Mexican food place.
I caught her eye and just kind of shrugged in a “what’re-you-gonna-do?” sort of way, but it didn’t lighten her reaction one bit. I had decided to wait the 5 minutes. Looked like they’d do the same.
11:30 came and went and the middle-aged woman’s agitation visibly grew with each passing second. I have to admit, it felt like a LONG time after 11:30–I’m not sure if it was her agitation, my own hunger, or both—when a teenager in Q-doba get-up finally came from inside and unlocked the door for business.
The women went off on the kid. Yelling loudly—again, paraphrasing—that there’s no SERVICE in America anymore! America is going all to hell! You lazy people can’t do your jobs!
I stopped her. I asked, rather emphatically, really? You’re a grown woman, yelling in broad daylight, in front of other people, at a kid working minimum wage, in the middle of pandemic, because—and I looked at my watch, surprised to see it was on 11:32 am—he opened TWO minutes late?!
She cut me off then. If she were a dog, it would simply have been teeth-bearing, violent barking. But being human, she was still able to lace acidic words within the barks, in violent, rapid staccato—“you-shut-the-fuck-up!” That’s verbatim.
At which point I stepped forward and checked her with a YOU-shut-the-fuck-up, pointing to the young employee. I said, look at him! He’s just a kid, doing the best he can to get you to your stupid burrito, and he has to face THIS?!
At which point everyone standing there, a crowd that had swelled to about 8-10 people; we all looked at teenage Q-doba employee. The most absurd thing of all occurred to me, and I bet to everyone standing there, now in silence. The kid was. Absolutely. Unfazed. Like, “thanks dude, but I’ve seen this before.”
I finished with you should be ashamed, at which the bearded older gentleman simply said, just let it go. I almost did.
As the now-unlocked door invited the day’s first customers, Crazylady kind of “gave up” and gestured for me to enter the establishment before her—as if the manners somewhere underneath her mania NOW bubbled to the surface, and since I was being a dick by challenging her, she was going to be the bigger person and let me go first. Well, that gesture made absolutely no sense whatsoever in context to what just went down, and seemed to confuse her as much as it did me. I put my hands up in a no-foul gesture, and said if you think I’m going to get between you and your burrito after all that you’re crazier than you were just acting.
She grunted, then led the two men slowly inside, shaking her head, and as the older guy passes, calmly, softly, almost sadly, tells me again to just let it go, while the young one sized me up as he slowly walked past, like I was an enemy of the state or something. He seemed conflicted about how to treat me as well.
The small, unnerved crowd that had cued up for burritos, kind of looked at the concrete as they shuffled in, one guy giving me a nod and a thumbs up. As we moved in the wake of what had just occurred, I sensed an air of sadness. Like, was this the new norm?
I’m happy I’ve not experienced anything like it since. Dining and service industries continue to struggle with a labor shortage here. Hours of operation remain spotty compared to pre-pandemic norms, and new variants send unvaccinated folks to the hospital, and still some to their graves, at rates as high as the country has ever seen. Still, life continues here.
Crazylady’s tirade informed me that America isn’t as composed overall as we’ve been used to. It’s not about unexpected, extended waits for burritos. She seemed equally scared as she was angry, that America could deliver a burrito to her at her whim just 18 months earlier, and it couldn’t anymore. There’s a sense of futile inability to stop that unraveling, that no matter how great she felt or said America was, SOMEBODY wasn’t living up to it—that teenager at that moment, for example. Anyone with any sense could tell you it wasn’t that kid’s fault Q-doba wasn’t open at her expectation. It was an infantile expression that the social fabric is frayed, if not unraveling.
Minnesota has one of the highest vaccination rates in the country. That’s somewhat reassuring. I continue to do my job. Kids are in school. All but Iita are vaccinated in our family and news this morning from Pfizer, looks like it will soon have an approved vaccine for kids ages 5-11 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) soon.
I don’t feel normal is coming back entirely for anyone, anywhere, anytime soon. Finland’s rates of infection remain much lower than here, but we got fully vaccinated here much sooner than we would have in Finland. The “value” of that is dubious at best because I’d be fully vaccinated there by now. I’m just not sure Taavi would be. But Finland has their protesters as well. Helsinki has seen public dissent against vaccination. It just seems like it has much less traction amongst the entire population, compared to here.
So, the “good-to-be-back?” America v. Finland question still largely gets a shrug from us when it is asked. And it is asked pretty regularly. The comparison is too tempting not to ask. It’s THE question. It makes sense.
When some place is considered home, I think most people struggle to empathize with what a move abroad would feel like as a value statement, let alone how it FEELS to live there. I sense that’s why the question is so at the tip of the spear when running into people we know, whom we haven’t seen yet since we got back. But if you consider that Jyväskylä is home for Mimmu, that’s about the only way anyone could truly feel what coming back might be like, for her at least, but to some extent, for the whole family.
We Americans are supremely ethnocentric. Ours is a history—and national identity, really—of global exceptionalism. “The greatest country on earth.” To challenge that notion in any form; by saying it out loud in public or by moving to a different country when you don’t HAVE to—is so counterintuitive to we Americans, that I think it feels kind of instinctually wrong at face value. If not wrong, then at least suspect. There’s a sort of loyalty check that I think most Americans naturally have in their guts, that, when held up to the light, emits a response that what we did was at best, a little overly-critical reaction to America’s response to Covid. It was reactionary at best; unpatriotic at worst. A look at our news cycle will show just how jumbled and indistinguishable these notions are in America right now. Those seeing it as unpatriotic might also feel an insurrection to kill the vice president and some congress people, and overthrow the nation’s capital, was an act of patriotism, for instance. We are living, breathing, testers of the American equation. And that is interesting.
Which brings this blog perhaps to a central thesis perhaps I’ve scooted around now for over year. When you have a choice, what matters in a place to live?
All humans want security. Our family has relative security in both places, but when you have the choice and you’ve lived them both, Finland feels safer. I’ve established that already, and I don’t think that has changed with our return.
All humans want fulfillment once security is met. We have that in both places, though as a family unit, our roots are planted deeper here, socially, professionally, and personally. Mimmu has great job with a great Finnish company she can do from here or there, she’s got her family and a network of friends in Finland, friends and my family here. But most of her adult life has been here. The kids have friends in both places now, but the friendships go deeper here because they’ve been sowed and watered much longer. I have deeper connections here with my family, long-standing friends, and two jobs that really fulfill my professional instincts. It’s hard to deny those things until the security scale tips to a greater degree. So far, it hasn’t. I think that’s the takeaway.
Our year in Finland was first and foremost, an opportunity we as a family wanted to experience from the outset of us becoming a family. The context of it happening during the United State’s fumbled initial response to Covid 19, probably was rooted to some extent in both Mimmu and me, as a security test, and a potential response to a full fail in that regard. It wasn’t a full fail, and we returned. Seems reasonable.
America is a resilient, amazing place. It is an envied state for good reason. American creativity, ingenuity, and downright persistence to lead in so many areas, took a front seat in developing an effective vaccine for Covid 19. That one-third of the population doesn’t want it doesn’t erase the fact that it was an amazing, time-sensitive achievement for which the world undoubtedly would be worse off without American power, infrastructure, and know-how to help drive it. Above the cacophony of civil unrest, breakdown in civil discourse, and patent, pattern and willful disinformation, America still has a core that somehow continues to deliver in grave circumstances. How that affects our security and aspiration as people is answered in our return, I think.
We have our lives here. We clearly wanted them back, and we kind of have them back. The kids see my parents and their cousins somewhat regularly, and their neighborhood friends daily. They are back in school, I hope for the remainder of the school year. They are doing well, and cherish their lives here.
My job continues to be thoroughly enjoyable, and I do it a little differently now. I recognize these young people I coach have been through a lot, and it’s not the same job it has always been. In some ways, it’s even more rewarding. I see the Q-doba boy in them. I have always been a stickler for the details of training and performance, and I still am. But I also see and feel that the young men and women I coach need me to be more human towards them than perhaps I was accustomed to before all this happened. I am a little less concerned about the results, and a lot more concerned about how they are doing. I’m a little less worried about getting all the details right, and a little more concerned about getting the tone right. I’m a little less focused on what they are doing, and a lot more focused on what they are experiencing. I’m a little less focused on how they are affecting me, and a little more focused on how I might be affecting them. In a word, I’m trying to be more valuable. That feels important.
I also got hired last week for my fifth Olympic assignment with NBC for the upcoming Winter Olympics this February. While nothing is really normal anymore, things are familiar, and that’s kind of nice in and of itself. It’s good. That assignment made it a little more sparkly, to be honest.
The fatigue of 2020-21 is evident here though. The Q-doba incident is just a blatant public example of a weariness and coping strategy that was not here when we left in July 2020. But the fear that seemed everywhere in July 2020 has given way to a more battle-hardened American citizen; a more polarized public health crisis turned political. It’s political in Finland too, but to a much smaller effect. If we are to enjoy the familiar, we have to endure this part of American life. I can’t say for sure we’ll want to. Right now we do.
It’s nice to be home in Duluth, doing the familiar. Still, I miss life in Finland. I miss Mimmu’s family. I miss the pace of life. I miss the security and social welfare. I miss the way the sunlight feels in the different seasons. I miss the culture that values so much of what I value. I miss the sports they show on TV. I miss our home in Haukkala. I miss all those things, and I probably always will. But then again, always is a long time. You never know when things will change.