Hockey Cures All Ills

I saw my first hockey game, and everything changed.

ice skating

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

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.