Want to be my dog tonight?

"Would you like to be my dog?" I call my children´s godfather. If Uffe were alive, he would greatly appreciate this opportunity to go out. A heavy wind is disciplining the trees. The occasional bursts of raindrops are wind-surfing on their leaves. It is nine o´clock and it would be unpleasant to go alone to the lakeside. - Unpleasant or frightening, it depends how honest you want to be. Not having a dog to accompany me I´m becoming very conscious of the geography of fear. I need to activate my creative talents. "May I talk to your dog Ansa?" I ring the neighbour´s doorbell.

Uffe used to check if Ansa had left any of her bones in the garden. A couple of times he found something, picked it up and ran immediately back home. He knew exactly that he was pinching something. Now it is time to pay back. In my house nobody finds pig´s ears as an irresistible temptation any more. I found some left from Christmas. Samuli had packed them into a big box. Obviously there was no need for more presents for Uffe.

Uffe was the only one in our family who felt authentic joy and excitement on Christmas Eve. He picked up his presents one by one, ran out-of-doors to open them, checked quickly what was in the box and ran back to get more. - Maybe we need to re-design our Christmas routines now. Or maybe we need to show our own joy and gratitude more openly.

Ansa had no interest in the pig´s ear box I brought her. She did not attack it to find out if there could be something to eat inside. The box was opened for her. Pig´s ears having paved the way the girls promised to come for a swim with me. What a luck and blessing to have neighbours like them!

We live in small houses surrounded by gardens - casas con jardin. This area was built in the beginning of the fifties. That is why the gardens are big enough for growing apples, gooseberry and currant bushes, potatoes, carrots etc. Few people grow anything anymore. The important thing is that we know each other, and we know approximately what is going in our families. Nobody feels any special curiosity about other people´s life, yet we are approximately informed about the various going-ons in neighbours´ lives. It is normal.

My mother lives in a block of flats, six floors and mostly elderly people. If you walk up the stairs you smell potatoes being cooked and coffee being made. My mother lives upmost and sometimes I walk up the stairs just to test my physical condition.

One day my mother told that someone had been found dead in her flat. I remember that a couple of times, when I walked up the stairs there was a very bad smell in the staircase. I also remember my mother having come into my car carrying with her a very unpleasant smell. It was very strange and I did not want to hurt her mentioning anything about it. I did not recognize the smell, but if I ever meet it again, I will know that it is the smell of a person who has been dead for some time already. The ventilation had carried the smell into my mother´s the wardrope. It had got stuck just with the clothes that she did not normally use and had to take out from the wardrobe.

It is not normal to meet smelling dead bodies in Finnish houses and blocks of flats. The staircases may smell cooking potatoes, making coffee, baking cakes, smoking cigars or anything else. It is absolutely normal. Living alone is normal as well.

As far as I know about forty per cent of Finnish households are one-person-households which again means that living alone and lonely becomes normal, too. And that again means that dying alone at your home is not absolutely unnormal. And if that happens the only message you can send to others is the unbelievably bad smell. Sending the smell-message is inevitable, but anyhow useless, if it is taken as one of the normal smells of a human household - baking cakes, smoking cigars, burning food etc.

When something totally out of normal happens, we miss it. Your last desperate effort to tell others that you are dead may get wasted. Maybe you know the story of American natives who saw the sailing boats approaching their shores in the horizon. They had never seen sailing boats.The concept was totally unknown to them, but they had seen strange clouds and other climatic phenomena. These previous experiences made them think that the sailing boats belonged to the same category of climatic events.

What am I trying to tell you? All meanings are shared. Somebody has first learned something and then told about it to somebody else. That is why this somebody else knows how to interprete the message sent. Even the most desperate smelling message is useless in an environment that has no related experiences. Please, share your experiences! Give away all that you know! Had my mother not mentioned that somebody had been found dead in a flat somewhere below hers I would never have learnt what the message told by that strange smell tried to tell me. Next time I know the message and I can call the police. The unnormal state of affairs will not last as long as it now did.