What in Sweet Blazes is he up to now?
I normally aim for around 1000 words an update… or in photographic terms, ‘one’. However. This past week – and I’m a little late posting, as will be explained shortly – was action-packed with things worthy of writing. So I’m tempted to split the post up into VicNotes12a, and VicNotes12b. This allows you – the patient reader – to find an easy division into two parts, should you wish to read half in one go, and the other half later. It’s kind of like one of those ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ books, only instead of having really interesting unique options (“You see a moray eel coming towards you through the murky waters. If you try to sing a duet from The Little Mermaid with it, turn to page 14. If you want to fight it, using only a rock and your teeth, turn to page 33.”) – you have “If you want to read about Chris playing hockey for the first time 14 years, go to VicNotesA. If you wish to read about Chris’s adventures with Taryn, whom he hadn’t seen for something like 3 years, then go to VicNotesB.”
Thus…
VicnotesA: Hockey Night in Canada
I possess a pair of “SuperTacks” skates. They’re a little on the vintage side, what with the surface rust on the blades, the crumbling leather on the boot, the plastic showing through the toe and the fact it’s about a size 11 for my size 13 feet. However… when I put them on, I skate like the wind. That is, if by skate, you mean “trip over the blue line in a manner reminiscent of Bambi” and by “like the wind” you mean “like a three-toed sloth during siesta”. Thus, when I was invited by the baseball lads to play hockey last Friday night, my excitement was barely contained. They could see how thrilled I was by the nervous twitching of my neck and look of a hunted partridge in my eyes. Night, of course, is a very appropriate description for ice time that begins around midnight and wraps up at 2:00.
I duly put my skates in my knapsack and biked to the other side of town to have them sharpened, though. After being laughed out of SportChek by the clerk who didn’t want to touch my skates for fear of “irreparably damaging them” (aka: breathing on them), I made my way over to a Source for Sports, that was much kinder. The polished off a lot of the surface rust and refrained from comments more disparaging then “Playing for the Ottawa Silver Sevens, are you?” I also purchased a hockey stick. After considering the shaft’s flexibility, the curve of the blade, the comparative costs and the materials used in construction, I bought the stick endorsed by the most random NHLer they had. That would be “Olli Jokinen.”
After biking home with my new stick across my handlebars, inadvertently wiping out car mirrors and unsuspecting dogwalkers, I made it home and began to assemble my hockey uniform for the evening. As mentioned above, I last played this game on ice when I was about 8 years old. Thus, I was a little short on the correct protective equipment. I ran over a mental checklist. “Skates? Yup. Stick? Yup. Helmet? Can get at arena. Shorts, shin guards, mouth guard, contacts, jock strap, shoulder pads? Nope. Jersey? 27 to choose from.” I was tempted to rip our phone book in half and duct-tape them to my legs, but I figured I didn’t want to look ridiculous. Instead, I wore long-underwear protruding from underneath my Hawaiian shorts, with my broomball jersey, skates from the 50s and my backup pair of glasses wedged into my overly snug helmet. (For those of you who knew me at Acadia, this is eerily similar to my ‘Beveridge Knights Broomball uniform. All you need to do is replace the bike helmet with a hockey helmet, and my pure white walking shoes with the awesome skates and you’ve got it… as this photo shows.)
After the people I met at the arena had all returned from the “really important thing they had to do” briefly after I showed up (I don’t know what it was, but I’m guessing it was sad for them, since they all returned out of breath, wiping tears from their eyes and clutching their sides), we got the game underway. I am happy to report that I was able to play a decent game of hockey. My skating wasn’t actually as bad as I’d rather direly predicted to myself, and courtesy of playing road hockey with my little brother, my stick-handling skills and goalie faking abilities were pretty good. Sure, I may have been spun around so fast it looked like I was in a whirlpool. Sure, I may have been able to stop only by gliding gracefully into the end boards with a sickening crunch. Sure, I may have taken a hard wrist-shot to the chest on one occasion, leaving me with a bruise the size of a grapefruit. And really, I may have been able to skate backwards about as well as I splice genes. But all in all, it was an absolutely brilliant experience. I even got off a few shots, and set up one guy on a smooth breakaway. My own breakaway was ended with a dazzling spinorama, where I stopped on a time, rotated 180 degrees and whipped a backhand just wide. Of course, that little sequence occurred because I accidentally lost the puck, turned so fast I nearly fell over and somehow managed to smack the puck with my stick as I tried to regain balance… but no one needs to know that.
Following that, of course, Jeff and I took a little side-trip to Wendy’s in order to indulge in a sandwich PETA has recently called “the single most damaging thing to animal lovers anywhere ever”, the Baconater. We felt that the calories provided by two beef patties, two slices of processed cheeefood, a bun lathered in mayo or butter, absolutely no veggies but SIX strips of bacon was a worthy use of our hard-earned calorie buffer. The fact it was at 2:30am didn’t seem to faze our thought-process, nor did the fact that I felt like a wounded water buffalo for the next 24 hours.
