Dated Letter - 28 7 80.23.

from:
Mikko Suominen
Parkanonk 25 A 4
33720 TAMPERE 72
Finland

July 26, 1980

Dear Friends,

I must admit it's too long a time since I last wrote to you.  And now most of the summer holidays are already over.  Just now we're enjoying the second spell of hot weather and sun.  I'm writing this letter in my backyard where I've got a tiny bit of lawn, a hedge, a couple of nice young birch trees and a few (very few) flowers.  The summer weather has been pretty good so far.  We had a very long hot weather period the weeks before Midsummer Day.

Last winter went pretty well at school and what I had of free time I spent it with my girlfriend Liisa, who lives a couple of miles from here, a good walking distance.  She is a widow with all her three children working and away from home.

We don't have any marriage plans yet and I can't say anything about the future.  We have been having a very good time together.  Liisa has had some trouble with her working life.  The small printing house where she worked and was a shareholder of went bankrupt in March and she hasn't been able yet to arrange her life.

Risto has one year of school left.  He has done some good work (but I'd like to say he could have done a little better, at least with his English and Swedish).  He got his driver's licence in the spring and comes to see me very often.

Marko will start school on the 18th of August.  He is seven.  He can read a little already.  I see him regularly though there are still more difficulties in arranging the meetings.  Three weeks ago Marko and I went to the sea and the small islands off Turku.  We had a wonderful time with my sister's family.  We spent three nights in their motor-boat.  We even had a sauna bath there.  We heated up a big pile of stones on the shore, then put a tent over the stones, threw some water on the stones and had a wonderful sauna bath and then plunged into the sea.  And repeated it many times of course.  And there were no other people on that small rocky island where we stayed the nights.  Even the water was reasonably warm for a dip, some 17 degrees centigrade, I suppose.

A few days ago I received some sad news from America.  Mr. Richald Dols, whose family I visited in Minnesota before I came to see you, had died suddenly of a heart attack.  He had retired for pension a year ago and sold his old house and went to live in Cumberland, Wisconsin, some 150 miles from his old place.  And could enjoy his new home only for seven months.  Mrs. Dols is now going to sell the Cumberland home and settle down in the old surroundings again.

I myself have enjoyed very good health for a long time and feel very grateful for it.

The controversial Moscow Olympic Games seem to be everywhere here.  The Finnish mass media are full of them.  It's not a new phenomenon here.  They should have a limit for their enthusiasm even in other times I think.  I follow them to some degree, especially the field and track events, but too much is too much.  Today for example we have 9 hours of the Olympics on the radio and 5-1/2 hours on TV. (Both TV and radio are run here by state owned companies.)

My best wishes to you all.

With love

Mikko