I'm not a morning person. Never have been. I envy those who just wake up at six in the morning and start their day like they were turning on a light switch. For me, waking up at six a.m. is about as much fun as a mid-winter skinny dip in the St. Lawrence river, and almost as painful. Yeah, yeah, all you morning people are tsk, tsking. I don't care what you think, mornings are meant for sleeping. Period. "Oh, but you're wasting half the day," they say.
"No," I reply to my invented stereotype of a morning person, "I'm saving time for tonight."
Night is cool, mornings are for chumps.
Lately though, I've come to see a unique benefit to rising early on the weekend. This form of torture is usually reserved for the summer season, wherein the pain of an early rise is easily offset by a round of golf followed by the soothing reward of a cold beer.
Last summer, when basking in the evening sun, watching my five year old chase a soccer ball around a field with the rest of his peers, my wife leaned over and spoke the words I had been dreading since I became a dad. "I think we should register Noah in hockey."
My heart sank. I knew what this meant. A lifetime of rising early on frigid mornings, hauling bags and sticks into frigid cars, to drive to frigid arenas, dragging our poor child reluctantly along. Now, I have no illusions that my child, as unbelievably incredible as he is at everything (which is true because he's my kid), will one day be centering the Habs on their way to their 30th Stanley Cup...although it could happen. My primary motivation is to expose him to hockey and hope, at least, that he will experience the same joy playing the game as I have.
I lamented to friends about my impending plight, and most, who had lived through this experience prior to myself, were sympathetic. There was one, and see if you can guess if she is a morning person, who raved about how wonderful it was for her. Rising before the sun on a crisp winter morning. Arriving at the arena before anyone else, watching her son skate onto a fresh sheet of ice. There was nothing like it.
Yeah, I know, cuckoo.
So, bullet firmly clenched in my teeth, every Saturday and Sunday I drag my pathetic butt out of bed, dress my child in full gear, looking much like a Hobbit knight, and plod off to the local arena.
Early mornings notwithstanding, watching these little ones fumble and stumble around the ice is extremely entertaining. Over the passing weeks, their skills have improved remarkably fast, they've become more confident on their skates, they handle the puck without falling over, they even show glimpses of the kind of player they will one day become. The coaches, who are the picture of dedication, run the kids through playful drills, like freeze-tag, torpedo (it's more fun than it sounds), and red-light green light. It's just plain fun.
Something happened a couple of weeks ago that changed everything. Noah had a practice at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning. My wife, who is a nurse, was working the night before, so it fell on me to deliver our little man fed, dressed and presumably ready to practice at the arena. When the alarm pierced my deep slumber at 5:50 a.m., I thought my heart was going to explode into a million gooey pieces. If there was any consolation to this grievous assault on my senses, it was that Noah awoke with a smile and a generally happy disposition. It was a plus I thought, but it didn't do much to take the edge off my grump.
The stars must have aligned, in fact I think I saw them on the drive to the arena, because we arrived before anyone else. I pushed Noah's skates onto his feet, performed the cursory tugging and twisting and yanking of laces until they were firmly, but comfortably, affixed to his feet. As we emerged from the stale air of the locker room we were greeted with a large, glassy and empty sheet of ice.
My boy, my little man, was the first to skate out onto the ice. He moved tentatively at first, then soon began to skate in wide circles, looping and sprinting, gliding freely without boundary or constraint. A few moments later a coach dumped a bucket of pucks onto the ice. They clattered and clacked, bouncing and skittering across the clean, fresh surface. If someone had taken a picture of me I am certain that my eyes would have been as wide as saucers, and my jaw would have been somewhere around the tops of my salt-stained Cougar boots. She was right, it was truly wondrous.
It seems lately, that the game of hockey in Canada has become more soap opera / epic movie. With the Canadiens melodrama playing out in wailing voices of overly obsessive fans and media, the recent near-tragic example of a head-shot that has pundits and analysts buzzing, and the impending Olympic games in which we have placed outrageously high expectations on our national hockey team. Much of this has been far short of wondrous.
Today, the CBC will celebrate the game we love with its day-long Hockey Day in Canada program. It is an opportunity to revisit that which we love about this game and why it is a unifying force in this country. What we hope to discover is that all the machinations of the hockey business world, salary caps and trade deadlines, playoff races, plus-minus's, these are not the things that define the game. I like to think that despite the cynicism and the high-stakes money games, that when the pros step on the ice today, a part of them will think of the first time they stepped onto a fresh sheet of ice, skating tentatively at first, then looping and sprinting, gliding freely as the pucks clattered and clacked and skittered across the surface.
Simple, really; everything new, anything possible. A fresh start. Which is why I woke up this morning at 5:50 a.m., excited to get to the rink early so that my son could be the first one on the ice. Yeah, I know, I'm a chump.
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