It’s been often said that there was a time when you went outside to play with your friends that was the last time you would ever do that. The last time you’d skin your knee crashing your bike because the winter sand hadn’t yet washed off the road. The last time you’d ride in a car with your mom and dad and siblings, on the way home from Christmas at your grandma’s house. These last times happen and we don’t even know it, which is probably a good thing. The ceremony and weeping would be too much to bear, had we known.
Yesterday was the first time I ice skated with a hockey stick in my hands since sometime in the mid 1990s, when I was in high school and my friends were, too. I skated terribly yesterday, but when I held that stick and awkwardly tried to look at both the puck and oncoming rough patches in the ice, I realized that I used to do this quite often. It was at the Field House in Williams Bay, when the rink would be flooded and the only gravel that wasn’t safely covered in a thin layer of ice was the gravel you couldn’t see until it was too late. I should have been happy to skate, this time with my wife instead of my friends Eric and Jon and Jon and Jon, but I wasn’t, at least not really. I was instead thinking about my hockey gear. Those shin guards and knee pads and CCM gloves and hockey sticks and maybe, once, even a helmet. Where did those things go? In 1994 dollars they had to be quite expensive, and for what? A few fleeting hockey games with my friends on that little patch of ice? Where were these things, the things of my hockey youth, the things that would have come in awfully handy yesterday on that ice rink. Should I buy new ones and try my best to learn, once again, to skate? I couldn’t focus on yesterday, I was too caught up in thinking about the olden days. Imagine these people skating near me yesterday, mocking my rental skates and rental stick and jeans. I had all of the things, dammit, and now there I was, relegated to the rental bin at a bumpy outdoor rink? I decided I’d have to have a talk with my mother, because who else would have thrown away my hockey things, if not her?