Em Blog Frozen

Um Haven para o Hockey Malnourished

Os dias os mais frios aquecem melhor meu coração do hockey

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 â€â€� 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.