I just spent 10 days in Helsinki working with Pekka, finishing the book about differential topology that we have been writing—it is done, I just want to do a search-and-destroy for a few things, add a few random references and entries in the index, and search for typos in a few pages we changed more dramatically than others, but I expect that we will submit it either next week or the one after. So, the trip to Finland was really productive. All the sauna visits were also ethnographically really valuable, and the coffee, Nepalese food, and muikku in Helsinki are really good, but what was great was to hang out with people I had not seen for a while, especially with my imaginary friend Pekka and with his former student Martina. Martina is now—for now is better because she is hardly predictable—a high school teacher, and we didn’t talk math. We just talked life. With Pekka, I talked a lot of both.

When it comes to math, Pekka and I are actually pretty much opposites of each other. Pekka is highly professional, really careful—the best example of what Sullivan described as a “pesky Finn”—thinks that proving a statement before having formally made it amounts to not having proved it, thinks that words like “anyways,” “well,” or “now” deface math texts, and has deep theological discussions with himself about whether an open cover of a space should be just a collection of open sets covering the space or an indexed collection of open sets covering the space. He also tries to have these conversations with me and then seems appalled, or at least highly disappointed, when I make clear that I do not give a fuck about that kind of detail. When I told him that if my father were still alive he would maybe sometimes insist on seeing my paycheck to confirm that somebody thinks that what I write is math, Pekka’s answer is that he has the feeling he would have gotten along fantastically with him. In some sense, I agree—but then I think Pekka would be horrified to see that, in other ways, I’m the civilized, mellow, watered-down version of my father. In some sense, Pekka and I are really different. In others, we are quite the same. In fact, at some point, years ago, we were told in a bar that we made a beautiful couple. I guess that it must have played a role that physically we look pretty similar, although he looks and dresses way more civilized than me, and although Pekka is fair and blond. I think that at some point I described him as “my lost Karelian albino brother.” Anyways, if I never did, I have now. I am really grateful to have a friend like Pekka.

mother goose

I guess that I should have underlined the word friend in the previous sentence. Even when I have not seen him or talked to him for a long time, when I see Pekka it feels like I just saw him the day before. He himself is less prone to express his feelings—there is no way in hell he would write what I am writing now—but I have the impression that this also goes the other way around. I am not sure what Pekka sees in me, but what I value most about him is that I know that I can trust Pekka. For being Finnish, Pekka is definitely on the chatty and gossipy side, and he does things like deciding that making fun of my ultra high visibility construction worker coat was the way to relax the atmosphere during the 10 seconds conversation we had when we met his dean in the bus to the center, but Pekka would not sell you for 30 seconds, or even 30 minutes, of funny, exciting conversation. Besides, Pekka himself, his graduate students—at least some—and definitely me, have made fun of his “mother goose” nature. That is a really well-chosen description: when one thinks of Pekka protecting Rami, a happy, cheerful 2m tall behemoth, one definitely has to think of the goose dad in Kung Fu Panda. Pekka’s mother goose nature is something real and deep in him. In the same way that it is easy to see when Pekka is happy and much harder to see when he isn’t, it is easy to see who belongs to the mother goose circle but much harder to see who doesn’t, but for what it’s worth, I know that I can count on him and that I can make myself vulnerable in front of him. In fact, knowing that I can count on Pekka is what brings me to accept the pain of taking away some of those “anyways” and other floridities from the math we write—a pain akin to having a limb severed, let me tell you.

Evidently, there are a few other people like that in my life, people I am not going to name for innumerably many reasons but also because trust and one’s willingness to make oneself vulnerable are part of a continuum. I mean, there are evidently people with whom I talk about some topics but not about others. There are people who are great beer-drinking material with whom I talk soccer or trees. There are people whom I have the feeling I could trust but with whom I end up talking about soccer or trees. There are people who are fantastically funny and wholly untrustworthy. There are people to whom I open selected parts of my life, keeping others under a tight lid. Then there are some weird cases of people that one knows would pay to share with others whatever you tell them, at least as long as it falls under a pretty high threshold because once it makes it over that level you know that they are discretion personified. Dealing with this last category of people is a bit of a high-wire act, but at least in some cases it is worth it. But there is only a handful of people with whom I can feel that I can be totally relaxed, and Pekka is one of them. In fact, if there are things I would hesitate to tell Pekka, it is to protect him, fearing that his mother goose nature could make him worry.

Another aspect of Pekka I really value is that I know that if at some point he did anything that ended up harming me, or that could have the potential of doing that, then he would apologize. On his own. Everybody eventually fucks up at some point, everybody eventually does something that breaks somebody else’s trust, and maybe everybody eventually feels sorry about it, but few people say it explicitly. Being in general highly unreliable myself, I can totally relate to that, thinking that often one can make it up in some other way. However, sometimes one has to say something, and I am sure that Pekka would. Why am I so sure? Simply because it already happened. A long time ago he came and apologized because some people had been asking explicitly about my private life and he had been pressed to say some things that he thought he should not have said. That he said whatever he said had no consequences that I can tell, but that he told me about it and apologized has consequences, for example the fact that I am writing this post. In any case, it might be my Catholic nature, or the awareness of my many faults, but if somebody does something that hurts me or that has the potential of hurting me and then expresses contrition, and if this contrition feels heartfelt and proportional to what happened, then I tend to consider it all as water under the bridge, and in fact my opinion about that person grows. Maybe expressing this contrition in words is the most powerful way—one that needs a moral courage that I am not sure I always have myself—but there are many ways of doing it, like being evidently and genuinely generous or like making oneself in turn vulnerable, but there are many ways. What I really cannot understand is how somebody that I trusted and in front of whom I made myself vulnerable hurts me, knows that they hurt me, and then acts as if nothing happened, or as if they think that one can go from “friend to whom I give all my trust” to “friend with whom I am as friendly as with so many other random people.” There are things that people do—either for free, or by mistake, or because they can do no better—that need clear expression of contrition. If it comes, then all is well. If it doesn’t, I can’t forgive it.

Anyways—Pekka, that’s for you—I am really glad to have in my life a couple of people like my Finnish imaginary friend, my Karelian albino brother. It is only sad that Pekka and these other people are physically far, and that only rarely I get to see them over a beer. Although if I am realistic, maybe they find me so exhausting that they themselves breathe with relief thinking of that distance as being what keeps them sane, what allows them to keep their lives ordered and peaceful. Whatever they think, I am really grateful for having a few friends like that, people in front of whom I do not need to protect myself because I know that if/when they do something that could hurt me, then they will show clearly to me that they are sorry and that they value me enough to do so.