Hockey Cures All Ills

I saw my first hockey game, and everything changed.

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That’s Hockey

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Athletes often are advised to visualize what they plan to do. This visualization is deliberate, an exercise, a means of controlling the narrative and outcome. I have benefited from this work, but I wonder how much more deeply I have grown from those stories I could not control, the ones that came to me in dreams or in unexpected scenarios—as hockey often did.

After a long night of watching the NHL Channel or a local Caps game, my dreams were glorious. Backstrom passed to Ovi over and over, Chimera flew, Holtby stalked the crease. Capitals, opponents, all shifted smoothly, swiftly, endlessly, their skating winding round my sleeping mind and soul. I thought of these dreams when I practiced my skating.

Sometimes, my hockey dreams were amusing mash-ups of other interests and loves. In one of my favorites, I am at a party. I am ready to go home. Frank Sinatra is at this party, and he volunteers to drive me. I look at him askance until I find out he also is a hockey fan. Then I say, “Sure.”

We spend the rest of the night sitting around my dining room table drinking bourbon and arguing about the only sport that matters. Who knew the chairman of the board liked hockey and Jefferson’s Reserve? I sure didn’t. We didn’t talk about music once, and we didn’t do anything else. (Even in dreams I have zero romantic interest in men with messy personal lives, but I do love to listen to their stories about their man-made disasters.)

Oddly, I dreamt easily of all things hockey, but not yet of myself playing it—perhaps because at that point I had not. I had used my stick off ice to work on passing and stickhandling, and I had skated at several rinks, doing my best to maneuver the baffling angles of the skates required by my new sport.

To finally combine those elements, I had bought the equipment necessary to put it all together at a very early morning stick ‘n’ puck at Cabin John Ice Rink. I had set my alarm for 5 a.m., slept very little, and was like a child again, ready for my birthday, staring at the ceiling in wonder and anticipation. I had tried all my gear on twice and so could mimic mastery, as long as nobody asked me questions about anything. And, I figured those nuts enough to get up that early on a lovely May day would be more concerned about themselves than my gear.

It turns out a handful of people had similar ideas, and when I went to the women’s locker room—they had one for women!—I noticed another bag in the room and realized I wouldn’t be the only woman on the ice, which was a comforting thought. I also was relieved to have the room to myself to unravel the gear post-dress rehearsal. It took me 20 minutes to put it on and then some to go over it all to guard against anything loose or upside-down. I blame most of the delay on the wrestling match I had with the sock tape. I narrowly prevailed.

I waddled out of the locker room. The door to the rink normally open for public skate was closed. I was confused about how to get on the ice but saw another person enter from an area with benches I had never noticed before. It was not nearby, so I had to waddle all around the rink, relieved that everyone already on the ice appeared too consumed with pucks to notice the newbie. I took my first tentative steps onto the ice, stick in hand, helmet awkwardly on head, gear so lightweight yet cumbersome. I couldn’t see much through the cage, and my peripheral vision felt blocked by the helmet.

I felt like a turtle in a tunnel. As I scooted tentatively across the ice, attempting to hold my stick as the Iceman had shown me, wondering how to balance in these skates and this featherweight exoskeleton, I found myself near a puck. I had been watching the four other people zipping around, shooting at a goalie in one of the nets, handling the puck all around the ice. I looked at them, I looked at the puck, and I replicated what I had worked on with the tennis ball on the floor in my living room until the cat got too involved in my practice sessions.

But here on the ice, my feet almost gave way from the force of my stick against the ice on its way to a seemingly stuck puck—heavy compared to the tennis ball, with no real give or bounce, unlike anything in my previous sport experience. It dawned on me that I had never actually taken stick to puck before, and I was astonished that my off-ice practice had no relevance whatsoever. I might as well have been hitting Twinkies with a fishing net for as much good as that tennis ball practice was doing me now.

As I struggled to get my stick somewhat back in my control and my feet firmly balanced, I decided to ignore the pucks for a bit and glide around holding the stick, trying to get the feel of the gear, the stick, the skates, the ice. Nothing felt right, but falling did feel amazing. Skating sans gear in figure or hockey skates had left me covered in bruises. I gave my hockey gear mad props for its unexpected no-bruise blessing, especially given I would be falling a lot more now that my balance was thoroughly confounded by the equipment and the stick/puck relationship. It was as if I had never been on the ice before for any reason.

And the skating. How did it get worse? How did I get slower—how was it even possible to be any slower? If I could see myself on the ice, would I appear stationary despite my earnest exertions? The gear wasn’t heavy, but it was awkward for someone whose previous sports had required at most a special hat or shoes—never body armor. Suffice it to say, my dreams and visualizations of how this would go had nothing to do with my reality.

That morning at Cabin John, as the full realization of the difficulty of what I was trying to do hit me, I heard the words of an older Sinatra, the one who had been through it and had come out the other side, the one not much older than I was then, and I found a way to smile. I am a late convert to his music. As a youngster, I didn’t like his smug demeanor, and as a lifelong Elvis fan, I didn’t take kindly to his dissing the King. But not long before I discovered hockey, I, too, had taken “the blows,” and his music had begun to resonate with me. “That’s Life” became and remains a regular cover in one of my musical projects.

“I’ve been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing/Each time I find myself laying flat on my face, I just pick myself up and get back in the race.” I knew that one thing, too, as well as another—as disappointed as I was on that day at the gulf between my dreams and my reality, I was going to love every exasperating minute of making them match.

And, I started to do so right away. Always an optimist, I also know how to turn disappointment into achievement. As I wrote to the woman who had helped me buy the gear: “I made it to a stick and puck last week, and I did not die or kill anyone else. So, a complete success, in my mind. Can’t wait to get to another.”

“But I don’t let it, let it get me down/‘cause this fine old world, it keeps spinning around.”

Gearing Up

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Ah, the non-hockey smell of brand new gear (even the pre-owned skates were oddly innocuous).

Had I known hockey involved garters, I would have signed up years ago, if only for the beautiful incongruity of all those sharp edges and armor-like accoutrements offset by a throw-back item more likely to evoke a hitchhiking Claudette Colbert than Ranger great Rod Gilbert. But these bland, utilitarian hockey garters are needed to hold up your socks, which go over your shin pads. The alternative is a newer Velcro socks/shorts combination, a disappointing choice made by a distressing number of people. Honestly, where is the fun in that? I intended to fully embrace this exceedingly amusing contradiction, especially as garters were the only things besides the gloves and skates that I had tried on before.

Oh, there were so many things to figure out on that Saturday in the Rockville Total Hockey. Because I had help, it was way less stressful and far more successful than my previous gear near-meltdown. Within an hour or two, I had everything I needed in the right size and configuration:

  • Skates
  • Socks for skates (not everybody uses these—the choice is yours)
  • Shin pads
  • Hockey socks
  • Sock tape
  • Hockey garters
  • Hockey pants
  • Shoulder pads
  • Elbow pads
  • Jersey
  • Helmet
  • Mouthguard
  • Gloves

Amazingly enough, I even knew how to put it all on. Whether I would remember how to do so when I went to the rink at some vague point in the future was another question for another day.

On this day, I had answers for gear success:

  1. Ask around before you buy. You can get a sense of what will work best for you by asking other players what they prefer and why. Even people using hand-me-down gear can tell you if they like it or not. These insights are super helpful. Also, other players may have gear they are willing to give away or sell that is brand new or slightly used. I got my hockey pants that way—brand new with tags.
  2. Figure out how much and which borrowed/used gear you are willing to use. Especially if you are not sure you will stick with hockey, you may want to borrow gear or buy it used. If you are a germaphobe, you may want to buy it all new anyway. Keep in mind that “used” sometimes is brand new because someone figured out quickly it would not work but held onto it for whatever reason. Again, asking other players is the best source for this because you may find gear from them or they may suggest rinks, programs, or stores that offer used items.
  3. Take a friend with you who knows about hockey gear. This may seem obvious, but I know many people who just went on their own to buy gear the first time and ended up with items that did not work for them. That is the chance you take with any new endeavor when you don’t know exactly what you want because you have never used any of the equipment before. Having a female hockey player accompany me to the store stopped me from making several bad decisions because she knew the right questions to ask of me and of the staff. I cannot emphasize enough how much she saved the day.
  4. Try it all on again before going to the rink. If you are going to an early morning stick ‘n’ puck, you may be the only one in the women’s locker room and have no one to ask if you are confused. Or, you may be like me and not want to ask anyway because you don’t want to look like as much of an idiot off the ice as you know you will look once you are out there. Putting on gear becomes second nature, but at first, it can be confusing as anything. Most hockey players are super friendly and happy to help with gear questions. But, if you are the sort of person who worries about the one grouchy jerk who exists to make others feel stupid, then try it all on again at home before you try it at the rink.
  5. Figure out what to wear under the gear. I knew about this thanks to the female hockey player who went with me to the store. It never even occurred to me that this might matter, but I found a shirt cut for women that I loved that also helped my elbow pads stay in place. I decided to wear the leggings I wore for ice skating with this shirt, and voila! I could walk into any rink with any changing situation with no worries. All I had to do was put my gear over the shirt and the leggings and I was good to go, and the reverse worked perfectly, albeit with lots more sweat, afterward. Whether a rink had a co-ed locker room, no changing area, or a women’s bathroom, I was ready to arrive and depart in a way that was comfortable for me. Changing areas vary wildly by rink, and it is good to be prepared for any possibility. I mean, there are garters involved here—if you’re doing it the right way.

Transitions

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When you have a stick you can work on hockey skills off the ice with a ball instead of a puck. I had a stick and a practice ball, but I also have a cat who would foil my attempts to stickhandle across my house’s hardwood floors. Poor Buster took a stick to his face for his efforts, and I ended up in the emotional penalty box. No Norris Trophy for Buster and lots of questions for me. I needed to take my stick to an ice rink to practice. But, to meet rink requirements, I would need something I dreaded: gear.

Lots of people like gadgets and equipment and fiddling with said and arguing about which of this or that is the right one, the best one, the cool one. I am not one of those people. Until very recently, my only approach to computers, cars, stereos, guitars, amps, guns, tools, and so forth was to ask a self-appointed expert that I knew to tell me what I should buy given my various idiosyncratic requirements and then I would go get it. “My guitar needs to sound like a Les Paul but weigh less than an SG.” Lo and behold one of my gearhead buddies knew exactly what to suggest.

I have done this forever for two reasons: It usually works extremely well and quickly, and more important, I hate fiddling with things that don’t work immediately. I don’t have a tinkerer’s temper. I angrily toss first and ask questions about the wreckage later. I am my father’s daughter in this regard; as age has mellowed me somewhat, I have gone from the one who could not work with him on projects to the only one who can. Our results in this new partnership have been good, even if the outdoor peacock house we built ultimately went up and then down in flames. Still not sure how that exactly happened, but all critters, humans, and other structures were spared because of mom’s quick thinking.

Like my father—and I am sure many others—I want to push play and have something work. I don’t need, want, or tolerate long conversations with new televisions. (It goes without saying that I am not an early adopter of anything except Fluevogs.) Although not likely to ever be an engineer, I did find hockey at a time when I had learned the value of process. Many years spent learning and teaching pilates had shown me the merit of getting lost in pursuits I could not control or fully understand, regardless of the outcome. For the first time, I was okay with working on and learning skills I might never master. Even so, my overall troubleshooting threshold is not high, although hammers and electronics fly less frequently.

So, it was endlessly amusing and confusing that I had fallen in love with a sport that required lots of fussing around with foreign objects. The skates and stick were bad enough, but I was getting the hang of their upkeep: the skate blade sharpening, the wax laces that initially required a pull to tighten, the continuing questions about my stick’s weight. I was concerned about the stick’s peeling tape, though. What was I supposed to do about that? I was ignoring it for the moment, unless given a good reason otherwise.

And, it got even more confusing on my first trip to the hockey store. I was dizzy. So many gloves. So many sticks. So many pads. A helmet that needed endless adjustments by an extremely helpful staff. I wanted to bolt when they had to replace the cage with a smaller one. More adjustments, screws, tinkering. Would this work? I had no idea. I bought kid-sized gloves. Did that make sense?

Excited but exhausted, I left with my initial loot and immediately emailed an expert. No way I could sort this out on my own, and I didn’t have to because the first woman I had ever seen play also was extremely willing to help me conquer the gear fear. I just had to ask. It was becoming a trend, this asking and receiving, this learning to wonder and not immediately press play, a trusting that whatever I needed would eventually find its way to me when it was time for the next question.

Lone Woo

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When discussing my attempts as a 40-something woman to play ice hockey, people, usually those who do not play, tend to ask if I like to fight and if I know how to skate. To the first, I can answer it depends; to the latter, I can say kinda, pointing out that I am learning that along with everything else. A common response is, “Oh, I could never do that,” followed by explanations of bad backs, long-ago/recent knee surgeries, potential broken bones, kid busy-ness, inability to skate, decrepitude, wrong gender, and so forth.

To those I sense might be interested but are intimidated, I counter these reasons: I have scoliosis; my skating coach had knee surgery; broken bones heal should they break at all; kids can skate with you; I’m older than you are; hockey is for everybody. The entire concept of hockey can be intimidating to anyone learning the game, especially to adults who have never skated before, don’t understand the gear, and are afraid of getting clobbered by unpredictable goons.

My success in encouraging the interested but skittish hasn’t been bad, probably because I totally understand the fear behind these questions. Being interested in hockey doesn’t mean I am not easily intimidated. I have been and continue to be intimidated by many things. But I have learned to go ahead and do most stuff anyway. This was much harder when I was younger and more concerned with looking dumb in front of record store boy, saying the wrong thing in front of comic book store guy, not understanding how my guitar pedals worked in front of other dude in the band, or answering questions incorrectly in front of hiring manager person.

We you get older and crankier, you also get used to finding a way through, sometimes by repeatedly handling it, whether job interviews or successfully picking out records, and sometimes through sudden epiphanies when what might have thrown you in the past instead holds you. Something like that happened for me on December 12 and 13, 2008.

One of my best friends, known here as Triathlete, has a schedule nearly as bad as mine. Getting to see her at all let alone attend a show with her that December 12 was in itself a small miracle. The fact that said show featured one of my musical heroes and was taking place in a Baltimore warehouse beautifully converted into an art space was more miracle. It was all getting to Holy See-documented by the end, when Ted Leo was as transcendent solo as in his band and when my friend and I had a chance to speak with him afterward. Seems her brother used to play in a band with him. Connections never hurt to start a conversation when you are prone to tongue-tied fangirldom.

That whole night could have been it and might have been enough, except for one thing: He did not play my favorite song. I emailed him about this the next day, because during his set he had talked about how challenging the previous year had been for him. I wrote that it had been intense for me as well, and I let him know that his album Hearts of Oak had been instrumental in getting me through it all, specifically a song called “2nd Ave., 11 a.m.” I thanked him for this and let him know I hoped to see his DC show that night.

There was a little problem with my plan: The show was sold out. It was in the club’s cozier Backstage space, and Leo has tons of DC ties and fans. Triathlete couldn’t join me, either. But, I decided to try anyway and got to the Black Cat right when it opened. I was reading Ulysses for book club, so I brought that along to keep me company, parked myself at the bar, and let the bartender know I was looking for tickets. He also was a huge Leo fan and had found himself in a similar ticketless boat at a Boston show that ultimately worked out for him. He was on the case, kept me well-supplied with Wild Turkey 101, and traded musical stories with me when he was free. Otherwise, I sat there reading, hoping, drinking, and finding the book making more and better sense.

The bartender did not let me down, and before I even fully comprehended my luck, I found myself Backstage, listening to Leo’s introductory patter. It was warm in that little space, as he tuned and then asked about the show the night before.

“So, was anybody in Baltimore last night?”

I was overwhelmed, a bit buzzed from last night’s magic, tonight’s ticket miracle, and the whiskey that was a more obvious factor now that I was standing and not reading. I let out one of the loudest “woos” ever in response.

I was the lone woo.

Now, maybe you are the sort of person who does this all the time, a bringer of show-going chaos who likes to yell “Free Bird” for no good reason, who banters with performers because you paid to be there, who never hesitates to throw the first punch.

I am none of those things. I felt at that moment that I was now the indie rock equivalent of a streaker. Was my face burning from the whiskey or the public humiliation? I didn’t know. I had belted out a response expecting it to be one of many, a cry echoed and supported by others equally enthusiastic in their adoration. Instead I heard my voice about as loud as it had ever been in a public place, all by itself.

Ever the consummate performer, Leo played it off. “Well, this is going to be the same set, so I hope you don’t mind.”

I was standing there trying to fathom how I could possibly be the only person in that room attending both shows when his comment wrenched me back into reality. Like Ralphie almost on his way down the Higbee Christmas slide, I had to salvage this. I had inadvertently made a spectacle of myself. I decided I wasn’t done.

“But wait,” I cried. Necks craned in the darkness, seeking the chaos-bringer.

I was undaunted: “Can you play ‘2nd Ave. 11 a.m.’?”

Leo stopped tuning, tapped his foot, put his right hand on his hip, looked into the audience shadows. “Did you email me?”

I was committed now. “Yes!”

He brought his right hand back to the strings, “You know, I was working on this earlier, trying to see if I could find a way. I’ve never done it solo, and I’m not sure. . .”

He stepped on a pedal, “Well, here it goes.”

And it did.

That ended up being just one of many highlights of two nights I will never forget, neither of which would have happened if I had been too fearful of looking foolish or of reaching out to my heroes. And that’s how this gets back to hockey. Setting aside the real yet manageable concern about getting hurt on the ice, I will translate what so many people who want to play but tell me otherwise are really saying: I am intimidated at the entire thought of making an idiot of myself out there.

That’s fair because you are partially right–learning how to play hockey is not pretty, and it usually happens in front of other people. No way around that fact. And I know players who make my head spin with their skills who cannot stand to watch themselves skate on tape. No matter how good we get, we will always look like idiots on the ice in our own eyes.

But you are wrong to let that intimidate you. Some of the best things that have ever happened to me have required me to get over myself, my fears, and my reclusiveness; to stop playing it cool inside my little walls, safe in the same, relaxed in routine; to choose to play the fool because sometimes that kind of vulnerability is the only way in and onto what you want.

As Leo says in my favorite song: “Oh, just open your door.”

And so years later, when hockey came into my life and I found that it was not going to be easy to do and that my critical, perfectionist self was going to be terrible for a very long time in front of many people, I knew better than to let myself get discouraged. I knew that however uncertain, confused, and exposed I might be as a new hockey player, like Molly Bloom in Ulysses, I would continue to say: “yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Weightless

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This post was not supposed to happen now. But, events in real-time must interrupt the previously scheduled, a bit of a Princess Bride moment, as you wish. I must be that inquisitive child, because only then can the heart of this story come through.

Once upon a time a woman no longer young, recently wronged by a wicked prince, had looked at ice as if for the first time and found that it was magic. It asked of her the impossible, and if she didn’t exactly perform its requests perfectly, she did them joyfully and consistently. And her heart grew strong in each new challenge the ice asked of her.

But challenges not of the ice started shouting, and they asked darker questions. When she answered, she also did her best, but their magic drained her. To withstand these darker demands, she shut down her strong heart, without even knowing it. There was too much to lose if she let herself feel the pain, but she only knew this later.

What she did know, what she did see, was that the ice had lost its magic. She stopped listening to its call for longer than she realized–days, weeks, months, 2015 almost through 2016. Her skates stayed covered, her stick feigned furniture in a corner, a talisman rendered mute and useless.

As is often the case with magic and joy, she only began to understand what the ice required after she had fled the darkness to a place no longer haunted, one not cased by wolves. Instead of screeches from buses and feral neighborhood children, she heard conversational geese and saw once again her constant childhood companion, the redwing blackbird. The deep darkness in this refuge overlooking water brought her every star, every night she ventured out her door.

Childlike, with an open heart in the protection of this star-canopied home, she heard the ice call to her again. And as she answered, her heart fully open, she knew that she could do anything it asked. And she did. Despite the mountain of boxes, the skates, her stick, were never fully packed away. She found a rink nearby and resumed the conversation.

As she moved forward, it wasn’t that she didn’t get bogged down in the darkness of others, especially people she cared about. She did. But, when that weight shifted toward her, she now pushed it back. She chose to keep her heart open, a decision requiring determination in an age weighted by distraction, comparison, and everyone else’s expectations and opinions on every single thing a person might ever consider doing.

And she is not the only one. Amazing things happen when you choose to play to win, instead of defaulting to play not to lose. You can set a city on fire with your heart, dance in fountains, win over the suspicious and jaded.

How many times can you hoist the Stanley Cup over your head? Ovi certainly makes those 35 pound-overhead presses look easy. Joy is weightless, apparently. And contagious. The one with the open heart wins. Choose to make your own joy, pass that along. Everyone wins.

The Beginning

Shifts

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In an interview before Stanley Cup game one in Las Vegas, TJ Oshie was asked if the Capitals could practice Vegas’s fast start to prepare. His answer touched on the game’s speed and unpredictable nature: “You can’t really emulate a game in practice like you would think you would be able to. The game is too fast, too physical to try to simulate in practice.”

His response got to the heart of something I noticed the first time I saw a hockey game. When things happen in hockey, they happen fast, without warning, and the only thing you can do is stay fully present and ready to adjust.

When you play hockey, you know things will change in unpredictable ways with uncommon speed. But when we live our lives, we often are led to believe that a plan can protect us, that we are mostly in control, that we can emulate and prepare, that we have our five-year increments to follow. People who believe this are football fans.

From the first moment of the first game I ever saw I was a hockey fan because its action unfolded the way my life has: a game plan out the window because of sudden and often painful circumstances, where adjustments required grace and intuition, and faith that the hockey gods would at least not work against me, even if they didn’t exactly seem to be helping. Strokes, cancer, heart attacks, job loss, divorce, death—affecting me or mine, out of the blue, a series of dizzying phone calls, each shifting my balance, forcing a play I had not anticipated.

Facing less, others have given up. Others are not hockey players.

Those who play balance on the edge, poised completely in the moment, whatever it happens to be and however unforeseen. They fall, they bounce up. They bleed; they do not care. They never stop moving until they step aside for teammates who have their own next shift to play.

Ernest Hemingway saw this grace under pressure in bullfighting. I see it most perfectly embodied among these ice warriors, who draw blood and spill their own, dodge their opponents or collide with them as the play demands, find balance amid a maelstrom that never stops.

People wonder why this particular Capitals team, after offseason upheaval, has made it to the finals where previous, more successful squads fell short. I do not. I have seen them all season flourish through disaster, turn adversity to their advantage, and persevere one period at a time. They stick to their game. They live in the moment. They thrive in uncertainty while certain they can handle whatever flies at them.

They believe. We believe. A city shifts.

 

Clean Slate

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As a new skater, old ice rattled me. Every chink, every gouge, every line traced before me went through my legs like car tires over rumble strips. The sparser attendance at mid-day ice—another reason I sought it out when possible—meant I had more time before the wear and tear got to me. Once I felt the wobble, the teeth rattle in my head, I had to leave the ice, knowing I would come back when I could start over fresh.

I don’t know if other new skaters have had this same weird sensitivity. But it created an awareness in me of the changing nature of my new playing field. Of course, basketball courts get mopped after a sweaty fall and outdoor fields of all sorts are tended at regular intervals. But ice lived and breathed and changed throughout play in subtle and drastic ways.

After the Zamboni, the new ice is a clean slate, ready for whatever you can bring to it. You choose how you mark it, what history you carry to it, how you see it evolve before you. As the time moves forward, as the cuts add up, at a certain point they will be erased yet again: A chance to start cleanly each new period with only the score lingering, another fluctuation until it isn’t.

To my mind, no other game has this capacity for starting over entirely. The cuts, the marks, the blood all melt away. You do this because you love it, the beauty of it the first time leaving you breathless; now the exertion of it stealing through you, leaving behind the twins exhilaration and exhaustion. You do this because you can. Sometimes you do it for the process, sometimes for the win.

And if you forget why you do it, you need to remember those moments on the ice when it all felt right. You go back to that space and you decide that, yes, you do want this. The ice may be frozen in place, but you are not. You want it more than anything that could work against you. You decide. You believe. You make your mark in the now.

You got this, Caps.

 

Destination

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Now that I had a stick and a bag of pucks, I needed my hockey skates to fully commit to my plan to play. Having sailed through three sessions of adult skating lessons in my figure skates, I knew that I would finally find my footing and fly in my hockey skates. My return to hockey skates would be a day of triumph, my first true hockey strides forward.

Except it wasn’t. Not even close. The second my hockey skates hit the ice, my body nearly did, too.  Whatever balancing and stopping I had managed in figure skates had now evaporated. It was as if the past three sessions had never happened; I was back to the perilous pratfalls of the previous October.

I felt no connection to the ice; my skates slipped around as if they had clear tape on their blades. As an avid toe-pick cheater, as I then discovered, I was toast without it. For pure self-preservation, I found myself clinging yet again to the boards, like the newbie I should no longer have been. In a last-ditch attempt to salvage some pride, I left my hockey skates behind at the rink for sharpening, a Hail Mary to ascribe my vanished prowess to equipment and not operator error.

I was now more relieved than ever that I had enlisted the help of a friend who grew up playing hockey and now lived near the rink. However, my transition would not be smooth, and I would not soon be learning the fancy stuff like t-stops that I had anticipated.

To his credit, he tried the t-stops anyway, ultimately dissuaded by the wild-eyed terror on my face and my Vincent Price-like cackle as I attempted them. He kept doing them, often flying away from me to get some actual exercise. T-stops and speed were as natural to him as breathing, despite the many years he had been off the ice.

He now spent his limited free time on Motocross, and he deconstructed its various aspects as we weaved around the rink. The details were welcome distractions from my frenzied mind, which was sputtering on an endless loop, “Why can’t I stop? Will I ever be able to stop? Oh, shit!”

And then I would fall.

After a few of these tumbles, he said, “You keep looking at the ice. You can’t do that.”

I knew that. I had sailed through three sessions, hadn’t I? But, I didn’t realize I was doing it. Too much focus on dying can be distracting.

“It’s just like Motocross. Wherever you look is where you go.”

And he showed me, shifting his view, his shoulders, his body, never looking at the ice, always looking at the next place he intended to be.

My attempts to follow his lead were by no means perfect, but they did change my mantra: “Wherever you look is where you go. Wherever you look is where you go. Wherever you look is where you go.”

Walk Up

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One of my best friends, a diehard baseball fan, once called hockey the “AC/DC of the sporting world.” As a life-long AC/DC fan, I accepted it as the compliment it is. She was helping me out with my hockey problem by attending the occasional game with me.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, beat ‘em,” she stood up and screamed as a fight broke out during a bruising Caps loss. At another, we made the jumbotron because she was singing along to “The Hockey Song.” She’s even better at baseball games, her home turf. Never leave a game early. You will be rightfully and loudly scorned if she sees you slinking by.

When I think of her, I think about baseball, and I was reminded of both one day, when on my way to the rink, my shuffling phone popped out my walk-up song. My theoretical one, of course, given I had not held a bat in years, and hockey really has no analogue. Clever DJs can make musical commentary before face-offs, but that is not the same. You choose your walk-up song, not the DJ.

And you must choose wisely. I could go into a long description of how certain aspects of my life have had frightening parallels to the lives of the music nerds in High Fidelity, but I will refrain for the moment. In the arguments/discussions that preceded my ultimate choice, which I now heard blasting from the radio and which I had completely forgotten about, I had shortened my potential list to five songs and three artists.

My choices had much to recommend them in my mind, and several of the songs could be said to have changed my life. Leo’s album Hearts of Oak and Harvey’s Rid of Me cover all sides of a broken heart, whatever the loss cause. The Leo songs shimmer as they urge the listener onward against challenges interior and exterior. The Harvey hymns brim with swagger and intensity, two necessary ingredients for a song brandishing an ability to crush the opposition.

But I entertained a different kind of crush. For me, hockey’s intensity went beyond the braggadocio, its spark was bigger and scarier, its flash essentially what happens when you fall in love:

“As soon as I get my head around you/I come around catching sparks off you/I get an electric charge from you/This secondhand living it just won’t do.”

If I were honest, that was what was happening to me. It wasn’t with a person and it wasn’t even going all that well, but it was falling in love, to a soundtrack of great big chiming guitars and drum rolls that almost don’t stop, amid the ebb and flow of not knowing what the heck to do or why, an energy that just can’t settle, “something going on inside, makes you want to feel, makes you want to try, makes you want to blow the stars from the sky.”

I said, yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Choosing Sides

by

After confessing my secret hockey ambitions to him, I now had an ally in the Iceman. He was wasting no time with the first order of business—finding me a hockey stick.

“Are you right or left-handed?”

“Right-handed, but I think I might shoot left,” I said.

“Ah, good point,” he said. “Come back tomorrow, and we’ll see what you like best.”

It was tomorrow, and the sticks, intimidating and intriguing as the best things usually are, were lined up against the wall.

There are competing schools of thought on choosing sticks. Although mirror twins, the Lamoreaux sisters both shoot right. Canadian programs tend to steer right-handed players to leftie sticks, and American ones tend to do the opposite. In theory, choosing a stick with your dominant hand on top gives you more finesse whereas placing your weaker hand on top gives your shot more power. In practice, you usually go with whatever feels most natural.

My idea that I might be a left-handed shooter had nothing to do with the above, which I did not know on this particular day, but everything to do with how thoroughly inept I am with implement-driven pursuits. If you want a laugh, hand me a golf club, a baseball bat, a racket of any sort—even a joystick.

Although I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in constant motion, I made no progress in sports requiring that kind of hand-eye coordination. When I played softball, I pitched—erratically at best. I either walked everybody or struck out everybody with no in-between. At the plate, I mostly closed my eyes and prayed. That may have been part of the problem.

Basketball was the only sport that made any sense to me. It took advantage of my slightly ambidextrous nature and kept my hotheaded younger self in check. It was far less rewarding to throw a basketball in anger than it was a club, racket, bat, or an accursed joystick. (I still loathe video games with irrational passion, although I always have and still love Tetris.)

So, as Bob Dylan wisely noted, when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose. And, I would add, when you know nothing, you might as well be open to all possibilities and follow your instincts. Because I was certain I would mishandle a hockey stick, why not see if left might be a little less awful than right? Why not trust the process for the first time ever?

The Iceman selected various sticks and demonstrated how to shoot a left stick and a right stick (although I did not yet know which was which.) I followed suit, taking the one he would hand me next, switching directions and monitoring the results. Honestly, in my hands they all felt beyond awkward and sometimes painful, but one was decidedly less so.

“What do you think?”

“This one,” I said, as I handed him the mystery and waited for his wisdom.

He smiled. “You are a leftie.”

I didn’t think my first hockey lesson would take place in my walking shoes in the wet cement at the back of an ice rink, but I was learning to check all hockey expectations at the Zamboni door, to be completely open to wherever this journey might take me, and, leftie stick in hand, perhaps to slay some old demons along the way.