Hockey Dreams Read Free Page B

fact, this lady’s hair stood on end the entire time I spoke to her.
    I was in New Orleans for a reading tour when the lady asked me this. I stated, “They come from the States or Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic I believe.”
    She burst out laughing.
    The laugh was insulting. And I countered it. I told her that most NHL players were from Canada.
    But she did not respond to this. For hockey had no meaning for her. She stared at me as if I was being flippant. I suppose I was. It has always been a part of my nature. Half pathologically shy, and half flippant. Even when I was little.

TWO
    W E WERE ALL GOING TO make the NHL when I was ten or eleven.
    In those years — long ago, the weather was always
more
than it is now. There was more of it — more snow, more ice, more sky — more wind.
    More hockey.
    We played from just after football season until cricket started sometime after Easter. We played cricket in our little town in the Maritimes or “kick the can” as we alluded to it. After we put away our waterlogged and mud-soaked hockey sticks. Behind us and down over the bank, the Miramichi River was breaking its ice and freeing itself from another winter. In the piles of disappearing snow, fragments of sticks and tape could be found.
    The sun was warm and smoke rested on the fields and grasses.
    At Easter, in my mind there always seemed to be a funeral. One year, 1961, just after Easter, there was the funeral ofa man who was shot in Foley’s Tire Garage, and everyone was excited about it. We were all friends of the Foley boys — there were seven of them. The oldest of them was Paul.
    He was the boy who told me that when bigger boys go into the corner after the puck — or after the ball if it was road hockey — always watch and wait patiently just on the outside.
    “You’re too little,” he said. And in a characteristically protective way that other children had with me, he added. “You’re also lame. You
can’t
use your left arm — so if you just wait, the puck will dribble out to you and you’ll have a chance at a goal.”
    A goal
. To score one goal was the height of my ambition.
    But looking back, half of us playing, half of us who wanted nothing more than to play in the NHL — which was always to Maritimers somewhere else — were going to have at least as much problem as me. Being a Maritimer certainly had a little to do with it.
    One of our goalies was a girl.
    Another was a huge boy with fresh-pressed pants and the smell of holy water, who believed in Santa Claus until he was thirteen. He carried his books like a girl and was in school plays with my sister. “I am of the thespian family,” he would say, because his mother had once played Catherine of Aragon.
    The brother of my friend who cautioned me about going into the corner was a diabetic — Stafford Foley.
    Stafford wore a Detroit sweater and in his entire life he never got outside Newcastle. He was a fanatical sports fan all his life.
    Another boy, Michael, had all the talent in the world but did not own a pair of skates until he was twelve. And then only a broken-up, second-hand pair with the blades chipped that he got from a pile in the Foleys’ basement.
    That was the year Michael also became a rink rat and swept and shovelled snow from the nets during the big games.
    There were others who could play fairly well — one I know had a tryout with Montreal and came home because his girlfriend phoned to tell him she couldn’t stand to be without him. After a month she left him for someone else.
    Another — Phillip Luff could skate like the wind and had the brain of a salamander, and ended up playing the bongos. Another, my brother, could think hockey as well as Don Cherry, but couldn’t skate well enough to make the pros.
    As we grew older we all went our various ways with hockey. It was strange to see boys who were on the ice in high school one year giving it all up to grow their hair long and smoke dope the next, saying, “Hey man