Our Game

My grandmother would have preferred my Saturdays spent indoors, book in lap, head in the clouds. In actuality this was often the case, but I was never content being pigeonholed as the brain of the family. I loved hockey -- the game, that is, not the surrounding culture. I loved the game, loved the sound of my blades on the grey ice of my grandmother's pond nestled in the evergreens just beyond the edge of her garden, loved the smell of the snow, the trees and the crisp winter air. We played every Saturday, most Sundays and some weeknights after school, daylight permitting, the same trio each time: my brother, our cousin Francis who lived across the field, and myself. The pond was just the right size for one-on-one plus a neutral goalie; nearly always my brother, who was the youngest. We played hard. Me versus Francis, trying everything to outsmart him and get a decent shot away at my brother, crouched between a pair of boots in his homemade cardboard pads with 'Heaton' scribbled down the sides in permanent marker. We played as though our lives depended on it, as though our loved ones were being held by the hockey gods as the fulcrum in some twisted balance of blood sacrifice and our own sweat.

We played until we could no longer see the puck against the darkness and the choppy ice. Then we would skate over to the boards lying frozen at the edge of the pond, sit, untie our skates and shoot the proverbial shit until the cold was too much to bear then put our boots back on and head across the fallow, snow covered potato mounds to my grandmother's kitchen with its warmth and smell of fried meat. There we would review our day's exploits over hot chocolate while my grandmother smiled at our exaggerated claims.

This was before my brother discovered girls and the internet (but not necessarily in that order), before my cousin convinced himself that the solution to his father could be found at the bottom of a quart of Jameson's and before I discovered radical politics, class-A drugs and the fact that cliche and despair are much harder to outrun than old age, venereal disease and minimum wage. We are all much older now, some wiser than others. I have not strapped on the skates in over ten years and I rarely think much about hockey or what might be happening in the NHL standings.

I loved hockey. But: I did not play hockey at any organized level. I did not pay two hundred dollars for a carbon fibre composite stick. I did not engage in, nor was I the victim of any hazing rituals at the hands of the entitled children of suburbanite lawyers. I did not have to endure the sound of my parents berating teenage referees, my coach or opposing players. I did not idolize Don Cherry, nor think that the only two worthwhile functions for a woman's mouth were giving head and saying 'yes, dear.' For all this, I am thankful.

I am sure my grandmother would be too.

Kirk Williams