On Frozen Blog

While most others sleep on Sunday mornings I open an ice rink. I’m in the rink by 6:00, and for nearly the first 90 minutes there I have little for regular company beyond the percolating coffee pot and, back in the Zam bay, the persistant hum of the rink’s compressors. In this tranquil solitude, with nighttime darkness still enveloping the facilty, I count cash drawers for the new day and make fresh sheets of ice on the Zam.

Yesterday’s tranquility, however, was obliterated by the pre-8:00 arrival of hockey mom who dumped me hard late last summer. Her appearance wasn’t a total shock — our first date three years earlier was in the same facility. I had arranged to have the rink all to ourselves that night, for skating. Her son still played, I knew. Inevitably, hockey would cross our paths. Still, hers was a savage thumping-dumping of me — think Petrovicky on Newbury — and the nearly half year of utter silence between us since (all voice and email to her ignored and dismissed) fostered an aura of ache-bitter in me that with her arrival made for an unnerving and emotional nuissance of a Sunday morning.

The broken-hearted, I wanted my pound of heart tissue from her.

The jilted Zamboni driver’s dilemma: knowing that her son was set to take the ice I’d make, do I raise the blade and lay little water, leaving the surface rut-ridden and rough (but undetectably so from the stands)? Suddenly, though, I took pity on her progeny. The morning’s first couple of sheets belonged to Bantam house leaguers; hers was therefore an inferior contribution to the lad’s athletic genetics — had she stuck with me and had we sired a boy he’d have been deemed travel-hockey gifted at conception.

I’m recounting for you here only the warmest of thoughts I had of her Sunday morning.

Think me petty and bile-bloated until you know this: on what she determined to be our last evening together last August we sipped Washington waterfront happy hour cocktails and dined at the original Clydes. Then she accompanied me home. Six or seven hours later she departed, attired only in the red jogging shorts and a Hershey Bears Calder Cup Champions t-shirt I’d generously offered her for her comfort. Neither of which she’s returned.

Strumpet.

I don’t care about the AWOL CDs in her car, or the shorts, but the wanton cruelty of thieving my only Calder Bears shirt, commemorative of Hershey’s extraordinary first-year affiliation with the Caps! I needed dramatic, Iraqi-style justice this Sunday morning — like her sentenced to running on my wet sheet of ice wearing only heels, the rink board gates locked, with my resurfacing blade and I pursuing her on it.

It’s remarkable how small a sprawling, multi-sheet ice rink can seem when it confines but two romantic antagonists. The witch surely knew of my presence as I rounded her son’s sheet on my mighty machine, making pass after pass in front of her (wimpily she forsaked the stands and was perched inside before the rink’s warming room glass). Even on my middle pass I could detect through the viewing glass fresh crow’s feet adorning her temples. And still she insisted on a platinum blonde dye job, oblivious to any notion of graceful, plausible appearance comporting with her chronology.

Phyllis Diller with guns, I thought. And even those weren’t real.

In addition to burrowing herself in the warming room wedged tightly between other hockey parents, she never once stirred for coffee or restroom break. In fact, she never glanced to her right in the 90 minutes her son’s team skated, toward the rink’s front office, where I dispensed locker room keys and sipped my coffee. I could reasonably infer her discomfort, but that wasn’t nearly enough for me, not with my champion chocolate Bear t likely tossed in her pile of dustrags at home.

I had one final volley at inflicting distress upon her. Post-game player changing and youthful locker room exuberance, through wins and losses, would deliver me a solid 15 minutes with which to resurface and make a hasty return up front, in time for her exit. But when I raced back up, my Zam perhaps still running in neutral in its bay, the hockey harlot and her charge were gone. In order to make so hasty an exit she fairly had to be at center ice when the game horn sounded, refusing her son’s changing into his street clothes.

The Dumper’s Distress.

Ah, but there’s more youth hockey season ahead.