I had the privelege of seeing Lennie Gallant this past weekend with good friends. A small perfect setting in Chester for a superb singer song writer, the man tells a good story through song. He played a song he had written to celebrate hockey in Canada, called Has Anyone Seen My Skates and as he strummed along and painted his picture I was brought back to this point in my life...probably hidden from my companions, I teared up a bit thinking of this. Once again proving that bond between music, words and emotions...here is what I "wrote" while he sung away...
There was, when I was growing up, a ritual for young boys growing up in suburban Toronto that was as certain as the coming winter, an absolute really, that you adhered to no matter the consequences. It revolved around the most Canadian of all Canadian things, hockey of course. You followed it, you played it, you lived and breathed it…it was sewn into the very fiber of your being. Even for me, despite not being born here, I was pulled by the tradition around me and the mania that surrounded the start of the season. There was no avoiding it.
In the later 70’s and early 80’s, for me and my mates, you were either a Leafs or a Habs fan, there was no other choice. Hockey cards were treasured bargaining chips and testaments of allegiances and persona. When your cards were pulled out of your too full pockets, the card on top was your calling card, marking you as if you had been branded by your chosen team. For me, let us say that I bleed Blue and White.
With this background it was no surprise that I wanted to play hockey. I pleaded with my parents to put me in hockey. As a way to follow my ‘passion’, as a way of fitting in with my friends and in the end, as a way of being Canadian. Whether you were new to the country or a fifth generation Upper Canadian you had to play hockey. It mattered not that I could barely skate and hadn’t played anything organized outside of pickup games of ball hockey. Nor that I had nothing outside of skates and a stick to call my own…I wanted, I needed to play. They had to understand.
What I didn’t understand though was what kind of position I was putting them into. How could they afford this extravagance? How were they supposed to make any sense of this stupid game? Barely in the country for ten years, accents as thick as bramble and their English not even a second language, third at best. I was ten years old and I had no concept of anything that they might have been going through, I simply wanted to play hockey.
Somehow they made it work. Resplendent with new equipment from Canadian Tire, not really certain how or where any of it went I showed up for tryouts. I assumed my combination of ball and foot hockey skills as well as plenty of Saturday Night Hockey games on TV would carry me forward just fine. I had this. Hell, I was going to make the Rep team. A first for a kid with zero experience playing on the ice, I was going right to the top tier, with the accompanying maroon and gold jackets. If team coaches picked teams the way we did while playing a game of pick up, trading back and forth from best to worst, I would have been near the bottom and grudgingly taken with a sigh. It was obvious I didn’t belong, not owning a hockey sweater I did my tryouts in a sweater that would have won honourable mention in a ugly sweater contest stretched over my shoulder pads. I was playing house league
Looking back what becomes apparent is that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. We were working poor working towards working middle class. Recent new comers to the country with factory jobs, no support and nothing to fall back on, my parents did as so many before and after had done…uprooted their lives in search of a better life for us all. Can you imagine showing up the shores of a new country, babe in arms, not speaking the language and making a go of it? It must have been terrifying.
Fast forward one year and my second season is just a few games into the schedule. We had won the league championship the year before and now I was a seasoned veteran, meaning that I could actually hold my own from time to time. When not tripping over the blue line I managed to play some decent defense…the poke check was my best friend. I hadn’t scored a goal but that was OK, I would have thought myself as the old school stay at home defenseman…Bobby Orr could take the glory. I was quite happy, even with the 6:00 AM outdoor practices. On this particular game night, as usual, my dad was driving me to the game and as usual I was already half dressed in shin pads, socks and hockey pants as we made the short trip to the arena. All I needed to do when I arrived was to throw on my upper body padding and lace up my skates. I was ready and excited. We pulled into the darkened lot at Albion Arena, dad got out of the car to retrieve my gear and in a momentary lapse of attention he left the key in the ignition…and then locked the door behind him. There we were, staring at each other with the car running, doors locked and my bag locked in the cavernous trunk of that ’77 Chevy Nova.
As I was running down Albion Road for home, half dressed in my gear, I was thinking how this exertion was going to affect my game. Which was probably good because if I was thinking about the darkened streets and dodgy neighbourhoods I was going to pass through to get home…two kilometers away, I might have taken a longer safer path. If I made it through alive I still had to play a 45 minute game. I reached my door knocking wildly to be let in. Probably from the lack of oxygen and extra exertion I simply grabbed the spare keys and started running again after a brief explanation to my mom…I got to get going!! It didn’t cross my mind to have her drive me back to the arena in our second car, the venerable Chevy Vega. Like Forrest Gump, I simply started running.
I can truly imagine trumpets blaring as I rounded into the parking area, striving those last few steps as I gave over the keys to my dad. Doubled over trying to catch my breath it dawned on me that we should have simply called my mom to bring us the keys from the payphone inside the front doors of the rink in the first place. Oh well, the ice awaits.
I asked my coach to sit me for a couple of shifts to let me get some energy back and in those few moments I lost track of the game. Something had gotten my attention, my dad sitting in the stands had grabbed my gaze and I watched him. Quietly sitting there on the bleachers, trying to follow the game, I came to see something different. For the first time I thought of what it must be like for him, the sacrifices he was making to simply just watch the game. All of eleven years old, I was only scratching the surface of those thoughts. I knew he hated hockey, it wasn’t his thing. How could it be? Growing up in war torn cobbled together Yugoslavia, he was far removed from the world of Salming and LaFleur. But there he was…my hockey dad.
Now, 38 years later, I have a deeper and much more profound understanding. Like Joni’s reinterpretation of Both Sides Now, there is more depth and more context to appreciate what I had seen. He wasn’t a “hockey dad” in the traditional way. Not because he didn’t want to be there for me and cheer me on, but because he did it despite the obstacles in his way. When I wasn’t on the ice did his mind wander off as my mind did when my kids played basketball. Sitting there was he thinking about how much gas was wasted while I did my Chariots of Fire run? How tired he must have been at 8:30 at night, working overtime whenever he could and putting in 50 and 60 hour weeks. Instead of being at home resting he was watching me play this stupid game. Speaking to no one because maybe he was self conscious of his accent and his education. The fear of standing out can be a strong motivator. How did he end up here? Was he thinking of his family back home? I bet he was. How could he not after all? Missing the language that he grew up with, his mother and brother still toiling away scratching a living out of the dirt back home. How hard it must have been for both of my parents.
In my short two year hockey career I never had a better night than that night. I scored a goal, my only goal, and added two assists. This was my silent dedication to the guy sitting alone in the crowd, huddled against the chill of the arena, watching but maybe not seeing a game he didn’t love. My sprint through the wilds of Etobicoke were small compared to what my parents had sacrificed so I could play that game. He embodies what I believe fatherhood stands for, in his way a quiet humbleness, content in knowing that he was doing his very best but always driven to do better.
Ciao
D
In the later 70’s and early 80’s, for me and my mates, you were either a Leafs or a Habs fan, there was no other choice. Hockey cards were treasured bargaining chips and testaments of allegiances and persona. When your cards were pulled out of your too full pockets, the card on top was your calling card, marking you as if you had been branded by your chosen team. For me, let us say that I bleed Blue and White.
With this background it was no surprise that I wanted to play hockey. I pleaded with my parents to put me in hockey. As a way to follow my ‘passion’, as a way of fitting in with my friends and in the end, as a way of being Canadian. Whether you were new to the country or a fifth generation Upper Canadian you had to play hockey. It mattered not that I could barely skate and hadn’t played anything organized outside of pickup games of ball hockey. Nor that I had nothing outside of skates and a stick to call my own…I wanted, I needed to play. They had to understand.
What I didn’t understand though was what kind of position I was putting them into. How could they afford this extravagance? How were they supposed to make any sense of this stupid game? Barely in the country for ten years, accents as thick as bramble and their English not even a second language, third at best. I was ten years old and I had no concept of anything that they might have been going through, I simply wanted to play hockey.
Somehow they made it work. Resplendent with new equipment from Canadian Tire, not really certain how or where any of it went I showed up for tryouts. I assumed my combination of ball and foot hockey skills as well as plenty of Saturday Night Hockey games on TV would carry me forward just fine. I had this. Hell, I was going to make the Rep team. A first for a kid with zero experience playing on the ice, I was going right to the top tier, with the accompanying maroon and gold jackets. If team coaches picked teams the way we did while playing a game of pick up, trading back and forth from best to worst, I would have been near the bottom and grudgingly taken with a sigh. It was obvious I didn’t belong, not owning a hockey sweater I did my tryouts in a sweater that would have won honourable mention in a ugly sweater contest stretched over my shoulder pads. I was playing house league
Looking back what becomes apparent is that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. We were working poor working towards working middle class. Recent new comers to the country with factory jobs, no support and nothing to fall back on, my parents did as so many before and after had done…uprooted their lives in search of a better life for us all. Can you imagine showing up the shores of a new country, babe in arms, not speaking the language and making a go of it? It must have been terrifying.
Fast forward one year and my second season is just a few games into the schedule. We had won the league championship the year before and now I was a seasoned veteran, meaning that I could actually hold my own from time to time. When not tripping over the blue line I managed to play some decent defense…the poke check was my best friend. I hadn’t scored a goal but that was OK, I would have thought myself as the old school stay at home defenseman…Bobby Orr could take the glory. I was quite happy, even with the 6:00 AM outdoor practices. On this particular game night, as usual, my dad was driving me to the game and as usual I was already half dressed in shin pads, socks and hockey pants as we made the short trip to the arena. All I needed to do when I arrived was to throw on my upper body padding and lace up my skates. I was ready and excited. We pulled into the darkened lot at Albion Arena, dad got out of the car to retrieve my gear and in a momentary lapse of attention he left the key in the ignition…and then locked the door behind him. There we were, staring at each other with the car running, doors locked and my bag locked in the cavernous trunk of that ’77 Chevy Nova.
As I was running down Albion Road for home, half dressed in my gear, I was thinking how this exertion was going to affect my game. Which was probably good because if I was thinking about the darkened streets and dodgy neighbourhoods I was going to pass through to get home…two kilometers away, I might have taken a longer safer path. If I made it through alive I still had to play a 45 minute game. I reached my door knocking wildly to be let in. Probably from the lack of oxygen and extra exertion I simply grabbed the spare keys and started running again after a brief explanation to my mom…I got to get going!! It didn’t cross my mind to have her drive me back to the arena in our second car, the venerable Chevy Vega. Like Forrest Gump, I simply started running.
I can truly imagine trumpets blaring as I rounded into the parking area, striving those last few steps as I gave over the keys to my dad. Doubled over trying to catch my breath it dawned on me that we should have simply called my mom to bring us the keys from the payphone inside the front doors of the rink in the first place. Oh well, the ice awaits.
I asked my coach to sit me for a couple of shifts to let me get some energy back and in those few moments I lost track of the game. Something had gotten my attention, my dad sitting in the stands had grabbed my gaze and I watched him. Quietly sitting there on the bleachers, trying to follow the game, I came to see something different. For the first time I thought of what it must be like for him, the sacrifices he was making to simply just watch the game. All of eleven years old, I was only scratching the surface of those thoughts. I knew he hated hockey, it wasn’t his thing. How could it be? Growing up in war torn cobbled together Yugoslavia, he was far removed from the world of Salming and LaFleur. But there he was…my hockey dad.
Now, 38 years later, I have a deeper and much more profound understanding. Like Joni’s reinterpretation of Both Sides Now, there is more depth and more context to appreciate what I had seen. He wasn’t a “hockey dad” in the traditional way. Not because he didn’t want to be there for me and cheer me on, but because he did it despite the obstacles in his way. When I wasn’t on the ice did his mind wander off as my mind did when my kids played basketball. Sitting there was he thinking about how much gas was wasted while I did my Chariots of Fire run? How tired he must have been at 8:30 at night, working overtime whenever he could and putting in 50 and 60 hour weeks. Instead of being at home resting he was watching me play this stupid game. Speaking to no one because maybe he was self conscious of his accent and his education. The fear of standing out can be a strong motivator. How did he end up here? Was he thinking of his family back home? I bet he was. How could he not after all? Missing the language that he grew up with, his mother and brother still toiling away scratching a living out of the dirt back home. How hard it must have been for both of my parents.
In my short two year hockey career I never had a better night than that night. I scored a goal, my only goal, and added two assists. This was my silent dedication to the guy sitting alone in the crowd, huddled against the chill of the arena, watching but maybe not seeing a game he didn’t love. My sprint through the wilds of Etobicoke were small compared to what my parents had sacrificed so I could play that game. He embodies what I believe fatherhood stands for, in his way a quiet humbleness, content in knowing that he was doing his very best but always driven to do better.
Ciao
D
So poignant and beautiful, a great tribute to your father
ReplyDelete