Hockey

The ice rink at Kerry Park attracts the town kids on this school-free Saturday. Parents drop them off or wait in pickups while they skate. Some of the older ones arrive on snowmobiles. Only one adult beside me gets out on the ice and maneuvers the flurry of pucks, hockey sticks, and kids just having fun. They slap the pucks sending them into the wall with a bang, they intercept passes, as many girls as boys, some half as tall as me.

They look with curiosity at the older person on long blades. Figure skates they know, and all the kinds of hockey skates, but racing blades they can’t figure. They say nothing as I turn some slow laps, getting used to the cold ice, so different from the indoor rink of many years ago, and so many years since these blades felt any kind of ice. But as we cross each other’s paths, exchange expressions, turn to avoid collisions, eventually a hockey puck came to me. I flicked it back to them with my long blade, which they thought a cool thing for an older person with odd blades to do. Soon we mingled and followed one another, they quick and fast-turning, me methodical with long strokes. They could out-turn me, but on the long turns and open straights I gave them a pretty good run. Unlike me, they face the wind with unmasked faces, their cheeks a bright cherry red. I sense they feel that only wimps wear facemasks, and I am happy with that. It’s good to play with skaters who grew up far away from me and learned the sport in vastly different conditions. It reminds me of the movie where a city banjo player encounters back-woods Tennessee folk who learned banjo in a very different way. They bounce tunes off each other and pick up what the other knows.



The total snowfall this winter is a mere fourteen inches, while the average for this date is twenty-four. Two inches fell last Thursday, and it has been mostly pressed into the icy pack by tires or shoveled away by diligent storekeepers. My mystery bicycle rider has either eluded me in scarce snow or has gone missing. That was my thinking until this morning when I crossed the bridge into Canada and found his tracks barely discernable on the pedestrian bridge.