A Later Memory—An outdoor rink at night. Music playing on the loudspeakers. The Crew Cuts and Sh-Boom. Couples holding hands or with arms entwined are skating around and around. I am holding onto my cousin Marilyn, who is blond, three or four years older, and beautiful. My ccm skates are bent over, and my ankle bones almost touch the ice. As soon as I right one foot, the other goes skittering off in the opposite direction. I try to push forward. I feel my verticality going, slipping away, so I try to shift my weight upward and back. This pitches my head and shoulders back even further. Now I’m falling backward instead of forward. Marilyn tries to catch me. My skates shoot out in front, my legs splayed. I land on my coccyx, the vestigial tailbone. I whimper, then cry. People look at me as they glide by. Am I nine?
A Final Memory—I am working as a City Hall reporter for the Globe and Mail. Somebody suggests creating a newspaper hockey league for reporters and editors on the three dailies. We rent an arena in north Toronto where we can play cheaply from midnight to one in the morning. I sign up.
I am assigned left wing. It is a desperate thing that I am doing. The potential for ridicule is operatic. I use the hockey stick to steady myself, to find and hold my balance. I pray the puck doesn’t come my way. When it does, I quickly shoot it ahead wildly in the direction of the net, then fall to the ice.
All night I avoid any physical contact, until one very fat man on the other team ripples me into the corner boards. I hit the ice. There is blood. I feel great. I have become a bloodied hero. I am no longer the skinny boob with glasses who can’t skate. I feel like my hero Ted Lindsay of the Detroit Red Wings. I get up slowly and weakly push off in the direction of the bench; “No. No, I’m all right, really.”
Am I twenty-three? Will I ever learn to skate?
The hell with it, I say to myself.
Forty years later, in the season of the Great Empty, I am clinging to the boards of an outdoor ice rink in Toronto’s west end waiting to take my first skating class for adults. It is a coincidence that I’m here in the season of the nhl lockout. I never watch hockey, couldn’t care less if the teams are locked out forever. I do not ever want to attempt to play hockey again. It is my intention to skate the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, lengthwise, in deep February. All 7.8 kilometres.
The class reflects Toronto’s celebrated multiculturalism. There is an Iraqi Kurd, an Englishman from Newcastle, a young woman from south India, a Bosnian, a young man born in Jamaica. They all have two things in common: none of them can skate, and they each have a good excuse. Unlike me. I am Canadian-born, the product of winter country. In the midst of the foreign-born, I am the outsider on ice.
Comments