Hockey Cures All Ills

I saw my first hockey game, and everything changed.

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Ode on Crossover and Turn

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One of the simultaneously beautiful and frustrating aspects of being a new hockey fan is all that I don’t know. Beautiful because I am constantly surprised. Frustrating because I am constantly playing catch up. (You don’t even want to know how long it took me to understand offsides.)

Last week, as it usually does in general and especially with hockey, the beautiful won.

My dog, the foster dog, my cat, and I were watching vintage games on the NHL channel. We do some version of this almost every day. Last week, it was the 1996 final World Cup game between Canada and the United States. I love watching these old games. I get to know the players I hear mentioned, often see interviewed, sometimes see coach, but never saw play—Messier, Gretzky, Richter, Leetch, Lindros, Coffey, Modano.

I suddenly noticed number 27 on Canada’s team. He wasn’t at the center of the action right then, and what he did was small and quick—two back crossovers, turn, two front crossovers (whistle), stop. I kept rewinding to watch him. He wasn’t skating. He was floating.

He reminded me of my favorite dancers and demonstrated my favorite things about hockey—the flow, the ease, the smoke and mirrors way the players dupe us into thinking it is oh-so-easy. We are really seeing the hours, the injury, the perseverance, the luck, the natural gift, the grit. Yet, as with all truly beautiful things, we let ourselves remain duped. Because that is all we know on earth and all we need to know.

My TiVo Hates Me

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It was time to get my ex-husband’s name off my cable bill.

After a few years of seeing his name each month; then getting angry; then calling up RCN to remove him; and then being required to fax in the divorce decree, my wisdom teeth, and my dog’s DNA, I decided to open a new account.

Through this upgrade, I would lose the interview with U2 that I had saved to the pre-TiVo DVR. This was the reason I had held out on a new account. YouTube came to the rescue.

My next concern was two-fold: I needed only the NHL Channel and WETAUK—the local PBS affiliate’s Anglocentric offshoot.

Before I found hockey, I watched one thing—whatever British mystery I could find anywhere. This meant I saw a lot of commercials involving catheters, reverse mortgages, and devices for elderly people who fall down and/or lose things. This sometimes concerned me.

The advent of WETAUK meant that I could go to one commercial-free place to watch those who solve crimes with various British accents: the horticulturalists, the drunk women, the restaurateur, Brenda Blethyn and her hot sidekick, the bitter Scandinavian cop, the small-town inspector whose wife barely hides her contempt for him, the lonely misanthropic Oxford intellectual as an old man and a young man, the former partner of the lonely misanthropic intellectual and his brooding intellectual sergeant, the Belgian detective everyone knows, the old lady everyone knows, the divorced inspector who pines for his tough-as-nails co-worker, the private detective with the most adorable daughter in the world, the Venetian in Rome, the morose gentleman cop and his working-class sidekick, the war-time inspector, the widowed inspector and his swinging 60s partner, the ambitious DSI demoted in charge of unretired cold-case coppers, and the 1920s pistol-toting-airplane-flying-hard-drinking Australian lady detective (Otherwise known as my hero. I am sure she plays hockey.).

I blame my mystery fixation on Edward Gorey’s Masterpiece Mystery opening credits, which hooked me as a small child and never let go: Why is this glamorous woman fainting on the ledge of a creepy old castle (i.e., my dreamhouse)? Who is that guy in the cape? Can I wear a bat hat on my head and carry a fan that changes colors?

My customer service conversation went something like this.

“I watch two channels—WETAUK and the NHL channel. Do you have a package for just those two?”

She and her Boston accent paused. For quite a while.

Turns out, I also needed CSN if I wanted to watch the Caps games.

Meanwhile, TiVo insists on taping programs with no relation to British mysteries or hockey, such as FOX news and the daughter-in-peril-of-the-week on Lifetime. And no, it wasn’t Paulina Gretzky.

But while scrolling past Mother May I Sleep With Danger, I was shocked, shocked to find that my TiVo, on its own accord, did record the best movie in the world.  TiVo, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Falling

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Anyone who skates knows that you have to learn to fall. To learn it first is best, but to learn at some point is necessary.

My first time in hockey skates at Fort Dupont Ice Arena was all about falling, something I had been doing for months in other contexts.

Raised Lutheran in the Midwest, I became convinced of my fragility. I was taught to fear the many things that could break me—love, death, divorce, mistakes, disappointment, judgment, imperfection, loss.

“Don’t break your arm,” they all said when I told them I would learn how to skate.

They should have said, “Don’t break your heart.”

But I would have ignored both.

I had made a decision that fear would no longer dictate what I did or didn’t do. I had a new philosophy: “Caution, meet wind.”

So skating and hockey found me at the perfect time.

Skating required me to do two things I don’t like to do: fall and stop. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes deliberately. But I was determined to learn how to do both—and when each needs doing.

So, when it all fell apart, and I had no one to show me what I needed to learn, I took a little break from the ice, put away my skates until October.

In this picture, I am afraid, but I am focused. My mind is racing, my thoughts on repeat: Ican’tstopIcan’tstopIcan’tstopI’mgoingsofastandIstillcan’tstopI’mgoingtodieIdon’tknowhowtostop
howdoIstopI’mgoingtodieunlessIfigureouthowtostophowcanIgosofastwhenIdon’tknowhowtostop.

Caution, meet wind.

1980

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“Blue helmet, red pants.”

It was 6:45 a.m. when I watched him go to the Arlington rink locker room, and I walked to the second level overlook at Kettler Capitals Iceplex. Unless a funeral or a house fire was involved, I never saw this time of day. That tells you everything you need to know about how I felt about him.

I was about to see my first live hockey game. The full import of his “blue helmet, red pants” comment hit me when I looked at the ice and could identify no one, everyone covered in armor, sleepy Vikings. Not that I knew anyone but him. Not that I knew him well or ever would. But, on this April morning, I knew everything I needed to. I was fully awake.

I searched for the blue helmet and the red pants—every player seemed to wear one or the other. And when I found him, I watched someone I loved shift into something more.

So fast on frozen water, he was purely elemental. As were those he dodged and chased in a flow I had never before seen, that made no and perfect sense, that felt like something I had once understood and had forgotten.

It was the sound, the skates scraping ice that brought her back to me.

I felt the cold on my cheeks, saw my breath. I was 9, an avid watcher of all things 1980 Olympics, and a determined speck in over-sized figure skates on the frozen field belonging to my grandfather. The ice had a softness to it, so I could dig in the toe pick to twirl and jump, avoiding the winter wheat that poked through. It would all melt away soon.

But I had that day. And the horizon and the joy of the moment and a peacefulness found in cold open spaces bounded by enormous sky and skeletal trees and undaunted childhood. I felt perfectly still even in motion.

Who were you before it all fell apart? Where were you when everything made sense? What did you do that gave you peace? That morning, I had my answer.

Hockey Matches, Ice Castles, and Missing Teeth

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I grew up a mere 120 miles from the Old Red Barn. Had I grown up in Guam, I couldn’t have been farther from hockey. A basketball player in a resolutely football town, I knew nothing about the sport my father affectionately refers to as “watching paint dry.”

Julia’s Hockey Knowledge Pre-April 2013:

Female figure skaters who face personal tragedy or compete in pair skating should enlist a former hockey player in their endeavors.

Wayne Gretzky’s wife ruined hockey by demanding that he leave an extremely cold part of Canada to move to LA so that she could continue to be an actress that no one had heard of before she married the only hockey player I had ever heard of.

Any sport with such low final scores must be really boring, at least compared to basketball.

Canadians, rather than Americans, were more likely to regularly participate in hockey matches.

I dated a guy in college who was missing his left front tooth because of a hockey-related childhood accident. He often left out the replacement tooth. *Sigh*

One of the few Paul Newman movies I hadn’t seen has something to do with hockey. Because of a secret desire to run the table on unsuspecting strangers, I have seen the ones about pool.

Most vegan cookies have the consistency of hockey pucks. (But not these, made at a true DC treasure.)

Ice skates were the same for everybody who skated, whether they were figure skaters or hockey players.

I rarely met people who paid any attention to hockey. The ones I did know, who usually played in punk bands, I liked quite a bit.

DC had a hockey player on its team who was Russian, a bit of a big deal, and had missing teeth.

In fall 2012, certain bars in Chinatown were struggling because of some kind of hockey strike.

And then in April 2013 I saw my first game. It wasn’t at the Verizon Center. It didn’t involve professional players. But, while I watched, I ran into someone I used to know.

Offsides Inside

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I don’t dream about sports.

But I dream about hockey.

A little over a year ago, I saw my first NHL game—the Capitals versus the Rangers, May 4, 2013—at the Verizon Center in Washington, DC.

And, that night, all night, I dreamed the game again.

Not that I could explain to you a single thing that happened. “Offsides!” was something extremely agitated drunk guys sitting nearby yelled with conviction and vituperation. I jumped out of my seat a bit when they did so, startled and confused by the sudden vehemence.

The guys skating around all looked the same, because despite 100-level center ice seats, I very much needed new contact lenses and hockey equipment hides everything.

To further confuse things, I was attending the game with a life-long Rangers fan, who now lived in DC and supported the Caps—unless they were playing the Rangers.

So, I decided now was not the time to ask questions. That would and did come later.

Now, it was time to get lost in the flow, in the grace, in the speed, in the joy, in the sudden score, in the swift loss, in the constant mid-course correction, in the blood, in the skate scrapes, in the ice sprays, in the shouting,  in ten men moving with and against each other in an ever-evolving eight-like shape over the ice.

I dreamed the constant motion, the endless pursuit, the relentless effort. Life but more so, a fast-paced peacefulness and purpose.

I would play.

But I couldn’t tell anybody that yet. I didn’t even own hockey skates.