Doing the Right Wrong Thing

As I remember it, Finland was cold. It not only felt cold, it smelled cold. There are other things I remember: the weird tinned fish, the trams and their nonsense destinations, the angst of using foreign money. But it was the chill that stayed with me. And the girl who lured me there in the first place.

I'd met Sari, a Finn, in Somerville, where we roomed together for a few months. She was my first love, and I soon became afflicted with a passion that steamrolled all other considerations: familial, financial, moral. I dumped my previous girlfriend in the most pitiless way, took up watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous so I could sit and brush my knee against Sari's. When Sari went back to Finland, I quit my job and followed. For three months I shuddered through Helsinki's frigid streets, bungled strange currency, and ate what I now believe was some kind of herring.

But these sacrifices, I later learned, did not mark the true measure of my feelings for Sari. Neither did the four-figure phone bills we racked up after the Finnish authorities kicked me out -- nor even the sniveling poems, the snot-stained correspondence we pitched back and forth across the Baltic Sea.

It was 15 years ago that I made my ill-fated trip to Scandinavia. My dad -- when I skulked back to Boston penniless and heartbroken -- did his I-told-you-so bit: I was crazy to have gone there in the first place. And he was right. For me, though, the most remarkable aspect of the whole experience is that, as I look back on it now -- the cold, the cruelty, the terrible fish -- I do so with a sense of having done precisely the right thing.

| Where Did Our Love Gogh?| Under Where?| Thank Heaven for Little Girls| Doing the Right Wrong Thing| Aw, Shoot| Submitted for Approval| Liar, Liar| All Night Long| Hello, Sailor| Sign of the Times| Queasy Rider| Tripping the Lights| Bar Fright| Circles of Love|