For a while there, as I sat munching contentedly on my Bagel B.E.L.T., I thought that the organizing narrative around which today’s trip to Horton’s would revolve is the repeated transformation of our breakfast order by one of the counter staff.  I won’t use the name on her name tag, but let’s call her “T”.  T. is in her late teens, thin as a rail, pale as a ghost and (as I complete an impressive trifecta of tired clichés) quiet as a mouse.  She wears a ton of eye make-up – all black – and though she herself never raises her voice above a single decibel, her entire demeanour fairly screams out that she is shy and profoundly uncertain of herself and her place in the Stinky Tim’s universe.  T. struggles mightily to recede into non-existence even as she stands at the register receiving a customer’s order.  By the time you’ve made it through “large double-double, bottle of orange juice and an apple fritter,” you’ll wonder who the hell you thought you were talking to because T. has somehow managed to dissipate entirely into the ether so completely, you’ll find yourself unsure about who took your money and made change on that twenty. T. may be emo, she may be goth, I don’t know, but whatever T is in her civilian life and among her friends and peers, she is not at all at ease with her role in the ranks of the Horton’s team.

I am keenly aware that I am far from breaking new ground with my ironically detached superior observation – shock and opprobrium, alert the national media – that a teenager, one working in a fast food establishment no less, has been found to be awkward and uncertain.  The only reason I mention T.’s difficulties at all is because her far from uncommon existential struggle seems to have spilled over into her work performance,in such a fashion as to make her almost invariably unable to correctly  translate the “variety of donut ordered by me” into the “variety of donut received by me” without exerting some substantial degree of authorial licence.  Do you see the irony in this?  T. herself acts and speaks in such a manner as to make one doubt her very existence, her very presence being a quiet denial of individuality, yet – at the crucial moment in the customer-service industry transaction where common expectations would include submission, servitude and compliance with externally imposed demands – she instead exerts her own personality and influence with surprising and disconcerting results upon the encounter.   I don’t know much about the criteria by which the work performance of Horton’s counter employees are evaluated, but I would have thought that – like foreign language translators – substantial points would be earned by those who manage to remain transparent and essentially invisible in the process, removing themselves from any obvious directing role in the production chain.  A skillful interpreter allows the words of Dostoevsky (though written by him in Russian) to enter one’s consciousness conceptually unchanged via the English language without the reader becoming aware of the intermediary through whom they have passed.  Likewise, at Horton’s, I would expect that a skillful counter employee would allow the “chocolate toasted coconut donut” ordered to enter my consciousness conceptually unchanged by providing me with a “chocolate toasted coconut donut”, rather than something else.  This type of interpretive transparency is not what T. believes in, or at least it is not what she achieves in relation to my breakfast order.  At her behest, donuts without jelly have spontaneously acquired it;  those with coconut have had it dispatched in favour of sugar or coloured sprinkles; at times, donuts have been entirely and completely transformed into a different foodstuff entirely, and dutchies or fritters have come out the other end of this creative process.  This has been happening with regularity and for some time now, and it happened again this morning when the “large steeped tea with one milk” that I ordered was transformed into a “large coffee with one milk” unbeknownst to me at some point during the transaction.

As I munched on my Bagel B.E.L.T., pondering the mechanics of this process, the morning’s real memorable moment unfolded right in front of me.  There was quite a line at the counter (evidently, the particular creative process described above is one that requires a slight bit of additional time to undertake, as compared to a more conventional “fill the order that’s given” type of Horton’s).  I watched as a lady entered the store pushing a stroller and joined the back of the queue.  She had another child with her, one that I took to be her young son, a boy about three years of age.  The boy was obviously excited to be going in to Horton’s (he must share my fondness for transformative and creative counter service) and was chattering somewhat loudly and without a sense of being overheard, as young children will do.  In front of him and his mother in line, there was a man in his late twenties.  The man happened to be a black man.    The child chattered about a number of topics in rapid fire serial fashion- what he wanted to order, events that had taken place on the way to Horton’s, the toy he held in his hand – and he seemed to say the things that he said the moment they came into his mind.  You might already see what is coming, but I certainly didn’t as I sat there chomping away on my bagel.  Just like that, the kid turned to his mother and asked her, gesturing towards the man in front of them, “Why is he black?”

It was one of those moments in which time kind of stops.  It would be wrong of me I suppose, as a white guy, to say that I have any real idea how the fellow in line felt about the child’s inquiry, about having to deal with this situation in the middle of a crowded Horton’s.  By watching him and his body language though, he seemed initially at least to be a little uncomfortable, wondering how to handle the situation.  The child’s mother certainly seemed more than a little uncomfortable too at first, though only for a moment.  It was as if both she and the man decided in an instant and without speaking that this encounter was not going to be awkward.  She leaned down, gathered the child up in her arms and picked him up, holding him at her own (and the man’s) eye level.  The child seemed to study the man’s face for a split second, then turned to look at his mother as she said something to him along the lines of “because that’s the way that he is, just like you” (though I confess I could not hear the exact words that she said.  The man answered the child’s question too;  I think he said something like “that’s the way God made me” and smiled at the kid.  There was neither embarrassment nor discomfort obvious in either his voice or body language, and the young mother too seemed not to be flustered by the situation.

The moment passed just like that.  The kid’s question had been answered, and he moved on almost immediately.  He certainly seemed to accept the man in line;  the child held out the toy in his hand, a little R2D2 figurine, and asked him a question that I couldn’t quite hear.  ”I don’t think he wants to play robots, dear” said the mother, as the man smiled but declined to take the figurine.  ”He just wants to get a coffee.”

Good luck with that.

Stop one on the way to “oore’s” (the “M” had blown down during Sunday’s windstorm) in Cambridge was our local Tim Horton’s. Those of you who follow me on Twitter (where my user name is warwalker) may have some familiarity with this particular location, as it seems to be a recurring theme in my “tweets.” We call it “Stinky Tim’s” because the neighbour’s property seems to have some sort of a problem with their septic tank, with the predictably odiferous consequences; the stench is greater or lesser, depending upon the prevailing meteorological conditions, but it is usually only problematic when one is sitting in the drive-thru lane, which borders directly on the property in question. Despite its olfactory woes, we quite like Stinky Tim’s, and will regularly bypass other Horton’s locations en route to our home to go to that specific location; I can’t explain it other than to say that it’s in the neighbourhood, feels like it’s the meeting place for all our neighbours, and it seems to otherwise provide us with endless entertainment. One night, for example, on the way home from some work related function, Spouse and I stopped in much later than we ordinarily would. Things were different right from the start: it took an unusually long time for the attendant to greet us and inquire as to our order; it took an inordinately long amount of time to explain, re-explain and further re-explain my order of “two steeped teas with one milk in each and a medium-sized box of Timbits”, which the said attendant had somehow garbled (twice) to relate to two medium coffees and a Boston Cream donut. When I had completed walking the attendant, step-by-step, through the list of items desired for the third time and was invited to “drive up”, Spouse and I looked at each other doubtfully. In the time between leaving the place where we placed our order (peeps with knowledge of drive thru terminology – is there a name for that place?) and arriving at the pickup window, Spouse and I concluded that our server was likely intoxicated. A quick conversation at the pickup window – during which it was revealed that there was still some profound uncertainty on our server’s part as to the items desired – did little to revise our opinion. Very shortly thereafter, he delivered to us the aforementioned two steeped teas and a medium-sized box of Timbits that was absolutely stuffed with Timbits. I’m not kidding, this box – which customarily would contain something on the order of 40 tasty little doughnut holes – had been packed, stuffed and jammed beyond belief, to the point that there were really no longer individual Timbits inside, but instead a multi-flavoured doughy brick weighing some four to five pounds. It was ridiculous. I tweeted to my followers that the pickup window at my local Tim’s was “paying off like a loose Vegas slot machine”, urging those interested to depart post-haste for the location in question.

Anyway, to get back to the point of my pointless story, we stopped in to Stinky Tim’s last evening to pick up a couple of cups of tea for the drive to Cambridge. Those of you in Canada will already know that Horton’s is currently running their annual “Roll Up the Rim to Win” promotion (specially printed paper cups sold with coffee and tea purchases each include a chance for the purchaser to win prizes, with the result being revealed by unrolling the upper rim of the cup – prizes range from free product at Horton’s locations, to computers and vehicles).   Those of you who aren’t Canadian may have difficulty understanding this, but Roll up the Rim to Win is a very big deal up here;  most Canadians know at least as much, if not more, about when this promotion starts and ends as they do about the NCAA March Madness Tournament schedule.  Most of us also keep a pretty careful watch on our personal win/loss record at Roll Up the Rim.  This year, Spouse and I have been on a relative hot streak vis-a-vis this promotion; at one point, I had collected 3 winners in my first 7 purchases (for some folks, this would just be another line on the resumé, but I like to think that I am an ambassador of sorts for the competition) – all of which were for a free beverage. As we were going through the drive through this time (word to the wise Timbit shopper: all staff appeared to be sober on this occasion), Spouse opined that she wanted to “win something different.” In particular, she said as she received her steaming hot cup of tea, she wanted to win “a donut”.

I could not let this pass, despite her illness. I took her to task for addressing the fates and identifying, among all the possible prizes that might be delivered, a donut worth approximately forty cents (retail) as her desired windfall. “Attention, Gods in Charge of Dead Hockey Player Donut Store Promotions,” she had said, “I would vastly prefer to win a forty cent donut over a thirty thousand dollar car.”

I’ll give you three guesses what the Donut Gods delivered.  I’ll give you a hint: I’m thinking about making another late-night run to the Drive Thru and collecting that Boston Cream this time around.

Judging by the beret, this particular criminal must be French.

Let’s play a little game, shall we?  Why don’t you tell me what species of reptile you see coiled in the leaves in the picture below.  I should mention that the little cretin was, um, what’s the word, “rattling” his tail when discovered.   By “discovered”, of course, I mean “nearly trod upon” during a brief late-morning survey Spouse and I conducted of the western environs of Juniorvania;  tramping about in the brush is a lovely way to spend some time in the warm sun of a mid-November forenoon, cup of tea in hand – provided, of course, that one’s woodsy saunter is not interrupted by pestilential menaces and assorted blackguards of the animal kingdom intent on doing you in.    My perambulations seemed to disturb our most recently discovered visitor, as Spouse advises me that the vicious little scoundrel actually struck at my pant leg as I strode through his immediate vicinity, blissfully unaware of the potentially mortal threat currently attempting to assassinate me.

Let’s make an identification, you amateur herpatologists:  tell me what sort of a beast you think it was that made such a brazen attempt upon my life.   Take a close look at the markings.   Remember, if you will, the rattling of the tail;  it’s difficult to forget, I can assure you, for those who have had occasion to make the personal acquaintance of this little villainous bastard.   The taxonomic process ought to be a little less stressful for you to do in the comfort of your own presumably adder-free home than it was for me during my dangerous, death-defying afternoon stroll among the serpentine assassins concealed around the perimeter of Juniorvania with evil in their repitlian hearts.   It will be easier for you to summon up Google and tap-tap-tap a couple of keystrokes,  possibly noshing on a little snack, as you idly venture a guess about the identity of my would-be killer.

Things were considerably less serene here as we embarked upon the process, I can tell you.  It involved rather a lot more screaming than I suspect most professional biologists employ during the conduct of their work, which screaming was spiced with a liberal dose of anxious profanity.  Still, we managed to get the photo and avoid entirely a trip to hospital, so all’s well that end’s well I suppose.  Except of course that somehow, during the identification process, the pint-sized terrorist managed to flee the scene of the crime and remains at large, a fugitive from Juniorvanian justice.  No doubt the little miscreant is plotting his next murderous escapade, so visitors to these parts should consider security precautions and have an eye to the ground when travelling alone.

He may be small, but he's a criminal.

If you look closely at the bottom of the picture, under the leaf in the middle, you can see the rattling thing on the end of the rattling thing.

When you get right down to it, I sleep about eighty-five feet from the edge of a cornfield, often indoors.  Generally, there isn’t an awful lot of noise out there for the would-be sleeper or his next-day relative, the dazed and confused early morning riser, to contend with.  What little audio ambience there is would typically be of the pastoral background sort – birds chirping, wind rustling through the trees, that sort of thing.

These noises, though were different.  My brain needed to assimilate and assess the information with which it was being bombarded.  First, I determined that there were noises of many varieties, and lots of them.  Whatever was happening out there was not taking place by stealth.   I decided to confer the status of “racket” upon what I was hearing.  With that taxonomic decision out of the way, I proceeded to consider whether there was possibly more to learn about the situation.   After some careful reflection, I decided that quite a number of the many noises were similar;  I decided to assume that there was a lot of something causing this cacophony.  But what could those somethings be?  Examining my audio memory banks, I could not recall ever hearing this particular sort of racket before.

I was beginning to get stumped about how to resolve this conundrum, so I decided to just look out the damn window.  This is what I saw:

Sunday Morning With Tom, Up In Here

You may not be able to tell from the photographic evidence, but Spouse and I had not one, not two, but something like thirty turkeys roaring around our backyard. Those of you who know your wild turkeys won’t have difficulty with that part of the proposition (you may even know that there are many accepted names for a group of turkeys, including “gang”, “posse”, “crop”, “dole” and “raffle”, or you might – like Spouse – just have the What Bird app for your iPhone).  You may, however, have some more difficulty with the following assertion:  they were barking.  And chasing each other around in circles.

I realize that the notion of barking turkeys may be somewhat controversial, particularly among those of you with an ornithological background.  I am well aware of the prevailing wisdom to the effect that turkeys emit a sort of “gobble-gobble” noise, and I am not denying that some of the din arising outside our window was indeed of this variety.  I think you can understand me, however, when I tell you that those noises were far less intriguing to me than the unmistakable barking also taking place.  There are those who will refuse to believe it, despite my previous mostly unblemished record as a person who relates at least some of the truth not infrequently;  these untrusting souls will say that I am spreading heresy of a sort.  All I can tell you, gentle reader, is what I heard;  I’m not here to pick any ideological battles, least of all with those inclined to amass specialized knowledge of so arcane a subject as the vocal habits of poultry.   Perhaps the turkeys were rehearsing – poorly – for  their performance of the woof-woof-woof version of Jingle Bells at the upcoming turkey Christmas pageant (what a sombre affair I suppose that gathering would be, given the likely solemn associations most turkeys must have between this time of year and the premature demise of a loved one or two).  Perhaps they were having a bit of a laugh and simply taking the piss out of a local dog that needed a good mocking.  I am unable to express a truly informed opinion on the matter.

Let’s just agree, for the sake of moving on to the discussion below, that I do not know why the turkeys were barking and leave it at that.  Equally concerning was their physical behaviour:  rocketing around in large circles and colliding with one another, they looked rather like NASCAR for domesticated fowl.  It was a puzzling display, any way you slice it, and Spouse and I stared in first silent disbelief, shortly followed by full-throated laughter.

We resolved to deal with this extraordinary situation in the fashion of 21st-century man; by educating ourselves about our guests.  Taking iPhones to hand, we quickly learned a few salient facts about our bizarre new visitors.   We learned, for example, that wild turkeys are native to North America and that, as the largest ground-nesting bird indigenous to the continent, they were so beloved by the hungry, marauding and colonizing Europeans that they were actually taken from Mexico to Europe in the 1500s, domesticated and then brought back to the continent by settlers on the Atlantic coast.   Meleagris gallopavo was treated rather roughly, however, by the colonists:  as the continent was civilized, it was also deforested and the turkeys’ reacted to this treatment of their habitat by dying in droves.  Evidently, in many areas (such as Ontario, in 1909) locally indigenous populations were wiped out entirely, leading many jurisdictions to import wild turkeys from other places and to re-introduce them to the habitat in an effort to get them re-established.  As recently as 1984, there were only 274 wild turkeys in all of Ontario.  Aggressive conservation and protection laws seem to have worked well for Wild Tom in Ontario:  by some reports, there are more than 100,000 of them now (many of them in my backyard, apparently).    Omnivorous eaters (occasionally dining on snakes and frogs), wild turkeys can fly quite well  (yes, I know, I’ve seen that episode of WKRP in Cincinnati too, but these are wild turkeys we’re talking about;  really, you must pay more careful attention) and like to roost in trees at night.

Also, I learned that  there is a National Wild Turkey Federation – apparently.  I was, however, confounded to find no mention whatsoever of barking turkeys in the serious literature available on the Internet.  This lacuna in the otherwise estimable record of the Internet at knowing everything, taken alone, would have been a disappointment for me.  Adding insult to injury, however, the only reference to barking turkeys that I located via Google was this distressing foray into fiction via the troubling sub-genre of poultry porn by Alexandra OneLight (actually, I don’t know whether the article is or is not pornographic – when I saw some passages near the beginning about the mating habits of wild turkeys, I simply assumed the worst).

Evidently, Wild Turkeys Like Corn Fields.

All in all, it was quite an educational morning, as you can see.   If that were not enough excitement for one day, Spouse and I popped out to pick up some grub and a cup of tea this evening;  upon our return, as we were travelling up the driveway, I saw a pair of beady little eyes staring back at me from the middle of the front lawn, about thirty feet from the edge of the driveway.  I slowed down to see what it was.

Skunk!

I didn’t stick around long enough to learn anything about him.

Admit it: you thought this paragraph was going to be about me getting ice cream all over the dry cleaning, didn’t you?  Sorry to disappoint – all clothing has successfully been retrieved from the cleaners and is safely back inside the house with little or no additional patina of melted ice cream.  I am an idiot;  just not that kind of idiot.

While we were driving back home, I mentioned that I needed to repair to Mission Control with all due haste, so that I could “art my writicle.”

Oh dear.  This might be tougher than previously expected.

Artist's Depiction: Juniorvanian Sleep Lab

We had a little bit of excitement around the ol’ homestead last evening.  Well, more properly, “early this morning.”

Please understand that I can relate much of what follows, of necessity, not by way of a clearly-remembered first hand account, but rather by way of a careful post facto reconstruction of events worthy of the efforts of the FAA aviation accident investigation team.

It was approximately 2:30 in the morning.  Spouse and I were tucked away in our bed.  Spouse slumbered peacefully, recuperating from the trials and tribulations of another work day.  Meanwhile, I was having some sort of a nightmare.  I cannot now tell you the nature of my nocturnal torment;  perhaps I was under attack by a horde of irate rabbits; it is possible that I was being stalked by a murderous piano tuner; maybe, I dreamt that Curtis Joseph was going to start the next game in goal for the Leafs.   Whatever the particulars of the threats presenting themselves to my unconscious mind, I was clearly on edge and sleeping fitfully.

In an unfortunate confluence of timing and coincidence, it would seem that – at the exact moment, mind you, of some critical importance and mortal threat in the midst of my nightmare – either Spouse shifted in the bed or Henry jumped on top of me.   Something living touched my legs, and this event in the real world, taken in the context of the horrors unfolding inside my troubled little skull, was sufficient to provoke an immediate, determined and physical response.

In a flash, I sat bolt upright in bed and began literally shrieking at the top of my lungs.  At the same time, I whipped off the covers and began to physically bolt from my designated place of repose.

Poor Spouse was like a firefighter.  She went from snoozing quietly to emergency response in a heartbeat, grabbing me by the arm and holding firm to prevent me from sprinting out of the room and down the darkened hallway, yelling “What’s wrong?” to me and – it must be said – attempting to wake me up.  I have to confess that I more or less slowly became aware of the fact:

1. that I was hollering bloody murder as though my hair were on fire;
2. that I was attempting to flee down a darkened hallway for no apparent reason;
3. that I had apparently been engaged in this process for some period of time prior to waking up; and
4. that there was no way to pretend that the above-mentioned events had not occurred.

In case something like this ever happens to you – in case you ever suddenly and involuntarily begin shrieking in full throat while in close proximity to your gently napping partner or spouse – let me give you a piece of advice: in the aftermath of this incident, when your spouse or partner is attempting to gather together what little remains of her shattered nerves, clutching her heart and hyperventilating, do NOT attempt to consider the comedy inherent in the circumstances.    It may be somewhat insensitive of you to begin giggling about the whole affair until after your loved one’s recovery is full and complete and she too can begin to appreciate the extraordinary humour that one might perceive in these events, when safely removed from imminent danger by an appropriate length of time.

One little bonus feature of last night’s events:  Spouse and I now have reason to believe that, as a sprinter, I am remarkably quick off the line.

Mike wrote about going to the Birch Aquarium the other day.  As is often the case, his post was accompanied by a number of photos he took of the excursion; others that he had taken while at the fish zoo were also posted on his flickr site. I took a few minutes to paw through them, and lit upon this image, which I hope he will forgive me for posting hereabouts without the usual “asking permission” formalities and so on.

It got me thinking about my own adventures in icthyology, many years ago.

Before I tell you the story, you have to promise to keep an open mind throughout.   Here’s the dilemma: as a grown-up person, a responsible adult with a job and a family, I am a capable and impressive person.  A living embodiment of the frontier spirit, some would say, I am plucky and irrepressible; not the kind of fellow whose bold actions and decisive self-reliance might be derailed by something so insignificant and easily defeasible as “fear.”  But I was not born to this devil-may-care attitude;  it took time for me to evolve into the tough-as-nails quasi-commando with whom you are now so familiar.

When I was but a boy in my early teens, however, my best friend Todd and I shared several obsessions:  Dungeons and Dragons; certain types of music (then in their first incarnation) that would now be described as “classic rock”; and fish-keeping.  I know that, in view of the nature of the foregoing list of my boyhood hobbies, it will be difficult for you to believe it, but it would have been fair to describe me – at that time of my life ONLY, mind you – as a bit on the awkward, bookish and nerdy side.  I know that this last statement will come as a bit of a shock to you all, in view of the now transcendent and enduring nature of my indomitable masculinity, but it is true.

Todd and I tended to see the world in fairly stark, well-defined moral terms.  For example, whereas the Rolling Stones were undoubtedly a human manifestation of whatever Good and True forces may exist in the universe, it was equally obvious, we felt, that Journey sucked donkey balls.  It is essential that you understand that in our universe, at the time, life was a series of revelatory choices, each with an obvious and important essentially moral component to them.  Thus, when sitting at the dining table in the mid-morning of a summer’s day, sipping tea and poring over the local newspaper, if Steve Perry’s voice should happen to emerge from the speakers of the ever-playing stereo in the background, there really wasn’t any debate about the proper course of action:  one or the other of us would have to get up and change the radio station.  To refrain from doing so – and this is where the moral, imperative quality of these decisions comes in – would have meant, in our minds, that we were announcing publicly our deep and abiding affinity for all things lame, inferior and uncool – a process that could only lead one, through inferential reasoning, to the conclusion that we too were lame, inferior and uncool.

What I am trying to impress upon you is that when I tell you that Todd and I chose to keep saltwater, rather than freshwater fish, this choice was no casual expression of mere preference;  it was a matter of something not unlike ethics.  Saltwater fish were good;  freshwater fish were worse than evil, they were uncool.

A cynic might point out – and remember, this is just the cynic talking now – that two jobless (and therefore impecunious) idiots ought not to attempt keeping the bounty of the sea in aquariums commensurate in size with their tiny budgets.  Saltwater fish are extremely sensitive to minute changes in the chemistry of their environment, changes that are almost impossible to avoid with a relatively small volume of water.   I had a mere 32 gallon tank;  Todd had both a 32 gallong and – monster of monsters, to our perspective-limited eyes – a 55 gallon behemoth that was in his family’s basement.  Whatever the scientific merits of the project, we were determined to focus exclusively on marine, rather than freshwater fishes.

At some point or other, Todd got a moray eel.   I think the moray started out in the smaller tank in Todd’s room, but it wasn’t long before it was moved to the larger one in his basement, and this is where I most clearly remember watching the animal’s exploits, which chiefly consisted of  “eating”.  It was about eighteen inches long, and spent most of its time completely obscured from view resting up for his next prolonged flurry of ingestion, nestled in the interior spiral of a conch shell which stood upright in the middle of the tank.  Todd fed the moray french-fry sized bits of (initially) frozen fish purchased from the  local grocer;  the feeding process being principally aided by a long set of plastic tongs, as I recall.  Todd would cut off a piece of fish, grasp it with the tongs, insert the fish-laden tongs in the water and kind of wave the rapidly defrosting hunk of halibut around over top of the conch, like a magic incantation that would inevitably result in the partial emergence of the eel/genie’s head from its gastropodal abode – just far enough to snatch the morsel of chow in its jaws.  The eel would then retract with an almost audible snap into the conch, like the spring-loaded power cord on a vaccuum cleaner.

Gradually, in the way that teenage boys do, I got an idea:  I should have a moray eel too.

There was only one pet store in the immediate vicinity that traded in saltwater fish:  The Pet Spot, a little store in a strip mall just a block or two away from the high school we attended.  Todd and I haunted the place;  as moray eels were not a common commodity, we needed to keep a constant watch on the turnover in the little shop’s stock.  I had become thoroughly enamoured with the idea of having a moray eel of my own.   We badgered Jim, the good-natured shopkeeper and, come to think of it, the rest of his family to bring in another eel so that I could have one too.

Months passed.   I grew comfortable with the idea of wanting to be an eel owner.

It looked MUCH scarier in person.

And then one day, it was there in one of the tanks at The Pet Spot.  An eighteen inch moray;  this one decidedly more reddish-yellow in colour than Todd’s blue-gray model, but – most assuredly – a moray eel nonetheless.  There really was no decision left to be made;  it was a given that I would buy the moray eel.

There was only one problem:  as we went to the store that day, I began to have serious misgivings about having that thing in my fish tank.  At the time, my aquarium was positioned diagonally across one corner of my bedroom, right next to the head of the bed.  This was an excellent vantage point from which to observe the various colourful damsels, butterflys and clown fish that I from time to time had in the tank – lying with my head on my pillow at night, if I left the light in the tank on, I could watch my beautiful fish through the aquarium glass from no further than two feet away.   It wasn’t really until we were on the way to buy the thing that it occurred to me that the eel would be in that very tank, and I’d be looking at its considerably more menacing visage from that same vantage point.

Always a quick study, I began to have buyer’s remorse even before I had set down my carefully gathered funds (cobbled together from the usual childhood revenue sources – birthdays, Christmases, assorted lawn mowings driveway shovellings) on the Pet Spot’s cash counter.  Before I knew it, we were on our way home from the store with the eel in a large plastic bag filled with seawater.

The fucking thing wouldn’t stop flailing around in the bag.

I tried to keep up a brave face – in the way that teenage boys do, you understand.  I tried very hard not to reveal the terror that was growing within me.  We got home, placed the bag in the open top of my aquarium and began the process of slowly acclimating the eel to its new home.  At the best of times, saltwater fish need to be introduced to a new environment slowly – their extreme sensitivity to slight variations in the water chemistry puts an unhealthy, potentially lethal stress on the fish if the introduction is rushed – but I was pretty fucking sure by now that the eel would be ready for him to live in that tank long before I was.   As the evening wore on, pretty much everybody in my family spent a fair bit of time with Todd and I in the bedroom waiting for the eel to be released into the tank, and then watching him when the Big Moment finally came to let him out of the bag and into the 32 gallon wild of his new home.

And what a show the little bugger put on!  The eel spent the better part of the next couple of hours swimming around the tank at breakneck speed, his snakelike body wriggling frantically back and forth.  He darted back and forth along the glass.  In the brief moments that he did pause – briefly trying out the conch shell residence I had graciously prepared for what I had believed to be his upcoming luxurious and langorous enjoyment – pictures were taken.   This was long before the days of digital photography;  the light was low and the eel was – as I have tried to make clear – thrashing about like a  kidnap victim in a burlap sack, so it wasn’t until much later that we learned that the pictures were a little blurry.  The eel’s serpentine body whirling rapidly around the tank burned snaky s-es in my mind.  I was beginning to sweat a little bit.

Every so often – usually when nobody else happened to be looking, the moray – my moray – stuck his head up out of the water and looked around.  I want to be clear about this:  without a word of a lie, the eel was swimming along with its head protruding out of the water.  To me, it was clear the fucking thing was trying to get out of the tank.  The top of the aquarium consisted of a series of squarish glass segments designed to rest in the grooved plastic molding ringing the top edge of the tank an inch or two above the water’s surface.  Largish portions of the glass, especially near the back corners, were cut out of the squarish panels to permit the various filters, tubes and air hoses inside the tank to be connected with the necessary power and air supplies outside of it. These holes were easily, in my estimation, wide enough for the eel to get out, and it was clear to me that this thing wanted out.

I started to obsess over one mental image:  I saw my self, head atop my pillow and in that never-never land between waking and sleeping.  I could see, in my mind’s eye, the eel emerging from the cutout hole in the back-right corner of the tank, the one right next to my headboard.  I could feel the eel slithering across my face as I snapped awake, its jaws opening and closing rhythmically (scientists will tell you eels need to do this to force water across their gills;  I am here to tell you that in actuality, they do it to scare the shit out of anybody watching).

Todd went home, the members of my family left me alone in my room with the eel, and soon it was time for bed.

Except I couldn’t get into the bed.  Well, I could get ON it, but I couldn’t lay my head down on the pillow.  Everybody else in the house got cleaned up, said their “G’night John Boys” and headed for the land of Nod.  I sat on the floor in front of my fish tank, watching that fucking eel go ape shit, back and forth across the face of the glass, now an inch and a half out of the water, now two inches, now – wait a minute, did it just bump the lid open a little bit?

I started piling the heaviest books I could find on my bookshelf on the glass top.  In my mind, I was certain that I needed a significant amount of ballast to prevent the monster from emerging.  I covered the holes as best I could.  I got in the bed.  I tried;  oh, how I tried.  I even put my head down on the pillow, once.  Briefly.  Carrying on a full-on self-eviscerating internal monologue laced with a suitable amount of saucy profanity, I finally admitted defeat:  I gathered up my bedclothes and my pillow and I swear to you I backed out of that room and headed for the downstairs couch in an effort to catch some shuteye.

Not much time passed before my parents were down the stairs, wondering politely what the hell I thought I was doing going to sleep on the couch in the den.  Sleep deprived and terrified, I couldn’t think of a plausible explanation;  I was trapped.  I gave up the explanation without much of a struggle, really.  I may even have cried a bit.  My folks explained to me, in a very nice way, that although they understood the nature of the presenting problem, in their considered opinion my plan of sleeping on the couch for however many years it took for the eel to die was not a rational and reasonable solution to the said problem.  I don’t know exactly how they did it, but parents are magical with words (at least mine are) and it wasn’t long before – incredibly – I found myself trudging back up the stairs, bedclothes in hand, resigned to my fate:  I would never sleep again, two feet away from a moray eel that wanted to kill me.

Again, I am somewhat hazy on the exact details;  I suspect, given my level of fear, that my folks must have slipped me some sort of stupefying agent or cast a hypnotic spell over me in a secret parental way that I was unable to detect, because I did fall asleep eventually.  It was well after five o’clock in the morning, but I did fall asleep.

I slept fitfully, drenched in sweat.  Over and over again, I saw the slimy eel emerging from its watery prison in a murderous rage.  Again and again, I watched as a horrified spectator as the monster pounced on my defenseless sleeping form, clamping its terrible jaws on my face repeatedly.  It was the least amount of rest I ever got while actually asleep.  When I awoke, I literally sprang from the bed, launching myself upwards and into the air.  I was frantically brushing at my torso, shoulders and legs, trying to ensure that I was not in contact with the horrific beast.

As I reached the apogee of my launch trajectory – my highest point above the bedroom flor - events began to unfold in ultra-slow motion.  I felt something;  maybe I caught a whisper of the gods laughing at me.  My eyes flicked to the front glass of the aquarium.  The moray was nowhere to be seen.  Slowly, I turned back in the direction my body was travelling and cast a glance at the floor beneath.

There, on the blue broadloom beneath my naked little piggies, coiled neatly and directly below me, was the eel.  The lidless eyes of the brute stared vacantly up at me, it’s jaws half opened and upraised.   I would later find out that the eel was, at this time, nothing but a crusty corpse and a former prisoner, the winner of one Pyrrhic victory.  At this moment in time though, perhaps owing to a trick of the light or a local atmospheric disturbance, suspended in space as I was above the awful creature, he looked every bit the same as my slimy tormentor from the night before.

Gravity took over, and – toes wriggling – I began my terrible descent into ignominy.

The roads were snow-covered and generally somewhat slippery, but more than passable.  I think we may actually be in a better position than many folks, living in our current location, because we generally only have to travel over main roads to arrive at our destination – main roads that get prompt and careful attention from the plowing crews.  I suspect that folks who live in subdivisions and down residential sidestreets were having to negotiate thoroughfares that were much more generously covered with snow than we did.  We really didn’t reach any significant obstacle at all, until…

…we reached the driveway.

The path leading in to Juniorvania is about a hundred yards long, measured from the edge of the road on our northern border.  We need a path about nine feet wide to get the official Juniorvanian Transport vehicle up the drive.  The snow was about a foot deep.  By my calculations, assuming uniform distribution and depth of snow (an unwarranted assumption, especially at the roadside where the plows had wrought their special brand of hellish magic), 2700 cubic feet of snow needed to be moved.  It was a very physical and very intimdating demonstration of the last mile concept.

Spouse parked the car at the side of the road and flicked on the hazards.  Together, we clambered over the snow drifts and headed for the house carrying the groceries we had stopped to gather on our way home.  Believe it or not, we had thought far enough ahead this morning to pack a couple of small shovels in the trunk of the car;  it was clear, however, from the size of the drift at the end of the drive that this was NOT a job for “small shovels.”  We needed to get regulation size snow shovels and a wonderful contraption known hereabouts as the “snow float”.  The plan was to carve a wee notch at the bottom of the drive, enough to permit the car to be stored safely off the road, and then see whether we could get the snowblower up and running at a suitable point, either later this evening or early tomorrow.

As I changed into my snow shovelling clothes and hurried back downstairs towards the enormous task ahead of us, though, it occurred to me that I have a mammoth snow blower in the garage for a reason, dammit, and I had better get the thing started and earning its keep around here.  Otherwise, we’d be shovelling for a significant portion of the time between now and July.

Spouse headed off down the drive to attack the obstacle with conventional weaponry;  I rolled the Beast out of the garage and commenced start up procedures.  Six or seven minutes were spent exploring the various permutations and combinations of the choke lever, primer bulb and gear lever while tearing prodigiously and desperately at the starter cord.  Twice, the Beast coughed to life – briefly.  Twice, it sputtered and fell silent.  Another six or seven minutes were spent inventing new curse words and wondering when the last time was that I exercised ANY of the muscles in my right arm.   The book of words for the snowblower contained a long passage that I had briefly considered reading about the importance of the proper placement and positoning of something called an ignition key.  I could not believe that such a thing was actually necessary, given the two brief periods of sputtering success I had earlier achieved, but was fresh out of ideas and still had a shitload of snow in my drive, so I returned to the house and began searching for such a key.  I did locate a plastic doo-hickey that looked like the ignition key pictured in the manual, grabbed it and – turning quickly to run back out of the house to the snow-covered driveway – promptly tripped over the cat.   A foul and profane phrase that would have offended Mike Tyson’s evil twin passed my lips and I returned outside.

I couldn’t find anywhere to insert the blasted key.  In examining the motor on the snowblower more carefully, though, it only took me a further five or six minutes to identify it as a device known to those in the technical game as an “internal combustion engine”.   Previously, my research into these devices had revealed to me that these contraptions are generally powered by a fuel known as ‘gasoline’.  It occurred to me that I might profitably endeavour to confirm whether the present engine had been furnished with the necessary fluids.

It had not.

I quietly filled the tank with gas, because I had run out of truly filthy ideas for phrases to utter.  Engine to “start” position, choke “on”, gear lever engaged, primer bulb depressed, starter cord pulled – and voila, we had ignition.

Forty-five minutes later, my brave little motorized auger and I had dispatched the offending snow (including that portion of the roadside horror not yet dealt with by Spouse, plucky little digging machine that she is) to various localities surrounding the via Juniorvania.  I have to tell you that I was feeling:

• mighty proud of my mad small engine skillz;
• like a brave pioneer who had self-confidently killed a bear with his bare hands (please do not speak to me about how the pioneers did not have internal combustion engines and about how bears are not made of snow and have way more teeth.   Brave pioneer boy does not like your insistence on hyper-realism); and
• very fucking cold.

My learning curve with the machine was not inconsiderable;  it took me about half an hour to realize that I could engage the power drive with the levers on the right hand side at the same time that I was engaging the auger power with the levers on the left in such a way that I didn’t have to keep holding down the auger levers, allowing my left hand to fart about with the chute-aiming control.  This, as anyone who has operated a snowblower knows, is very important because if you don’t manipulate the chute-aiming control just so, the snow that is ejected from the machine will be blown forcefully and directly into the operator’s face.  My own personal research on this issue indicates that the margin for error in this regard is slim indeed;  approximately 98% of the available settings of this control seemed to result in all or substantially all of the blown snow ending up caked in my eyebrows, packed in my nostrils, glazed across my face and crystallized in my ears (when I was smart enough to turn my head rather than taking the snow exhaust plume right in the face).  Please be advised, you may not be able to achieve such excellent results in your own laboratory.

Ten minutes after I came back into the house, emptied the snow out of my underwear and coughed up a snowball the size of a pumpkin, I sat down and wrote this year’s letter to Santa.  Item number one on Junior’s Christmas list:  a balaclava.

But I digress.

My point is that we had this job to do and people were depending on us.  Those of you in the working world will understand these concepts and identify them as something known as “responsibility”.  It is something that is entirely foreign to musicians, serious artists and other more highly evolved and important life forms.  Being a musician is not about producing things on time (except for musicians who actually get paid to do what they do because they’re good at it);  when you are a Serious Artist (please read: “unemployed”) working on a Weighty Piece of Art, you cannot be rushed, especially when you haven’t got a fucking clue what you’re doing or why (which is most of the time). The full explanation for this principle is complicated and top-secret (you have to be in the Union to get the complete spiel on this one) but I can tell you that what it boils down to is that as soon as any musician agrees to produce a certain quantity of music, he will immediately cease to produce any music whatsoever and instead spend a lot of time down at the pub.  This is mostly because it’s noisy and they have beer there, both of which are excellent accessories for the gentleman musician who is assiduously avoiding the nagging feeling that he’s falling well behind schedule, productivity-wise, and is thereby “letting the home side down”, also known as “spectacularly failing to achieve even a laughably modest amount of success in an oh-too-public fashion”.

I will spare you the hyperbole about my angst-ridden and lonely excursions through agonizing evening “writing sessions”, alone in my apartment and filled with self-doubt, plunking away on an uncooperative guitar that – for the most part – refused to offer up the masterpiece of musical beauty that would transform a lousy movie into a piece of art.  (Okay, so I lied, I won’t spare you all of the hyperbole about that.  Sue me.)

Eventually, through a confidential commercial transaction that I am not fully at liberty to discuss, certain nefarious underworld forces delivered to me, as consideration for some (somewhat damaged) spiritual merchandise I offered for sale, a tune or two that could be worked into something approaching an interesting musical idea.  My bandmates and I headed into our expansive private studio of the day – of which more will be said in a moment – to work on the idea as a band, to settle on an arrangement, to rehearse the completed composition and ultimately, to record a demo of the song to play for the film’s production braintrust.

At the time that these events came to pass, in late 1998, our “expansive private studio” consisted of the second floor of a very small and extremely run-down house in eastern Toronto.  The house was owned by another friend of ours, a fellow who physically resembled Wavy Gravy of Woodstock fame, and we only ever referred to him as Wavy Gravy.  I have forgotten the man’s real name.   We’d done some work for Wavy Gravy but he had been unable to pay us for that work in any recognized medium of exchange, such as money.  You get used to that sort of thing as a musician, particularly when you are not an especially skilled musician.  There was a tenant on the first floor of the Wavy Gravy house, which was in an exceptionally dodgy neighbourhood.  I cannot imagine the horrors he endured during the few hours that we were not actively and aggressively attempting to destory his typmanic membranes from above.  The entire Wavy Gravy house was overrun with what I am going to continue to tell myself were particularly large mice with unusually long tails and larger than average teeth.  Its many charms included an apparently improperly grounded electrical system that delivered an astonishingly powerful shock to singers and other stupid people who happened to let their lips come into contact with a live microphone, a broken-down refrigerator literally filled with rotten stinking meat of indeterminate origin, and a “ventilation” system that furnished air thoroughly infused with the overpowering stench of urine throughout every square inch of the approximately sixty-four square feet of available floorspace.

The place also had some less positive features.  Chief among these was the community of inveterate thieves that apparently continually surveilled the premises simply waiting for the first available and highly inconvenient opportunity to enter the place and perpetrate assholery.  This they did, no doubt, by simply looking askance at the laughably dubious locking mechanism on the main door, and then making off with the only possessions that truly mattered to us at that time – our instruments.  These rotten soulless bastards also made off with the only possessions that truly mattered to the nice folks at Long & McQuade Musical Instruments, from whom we had rented a not inconsiderable amount of equipment (luxuries like microphones, speakers and tape recorders) in an effort to make a recording that accomplished the very important principal objective of existing.   No problem there, you might assume, it ought to be a simple matter of making a telephone call to the insurance claims agent.   The problem with insurance and musicians, however, is that insurance salesmen – unlike musicians – have not yet learned the skill of receiving payment for things (such as insurance coverage) without resorting to the use of actual money.   As money is only infrequently found in the vicinity of musicians, there is an inherent structural problem that is rather obvious.

Thus did it come to pass that – thanks to the Great Musical Instrument Theft of  Christmas Eve 1998 – our little tribe of Tiny Tims was saddled with an enormous debt to repay, no instruments to play, and no recognizable means of actually accomplishing the writing assignment that we had agreed to complete.  Other than that, things were just peachy.

You might conclude, based on a cursory review of the tale recounted above, that my experience with helping create cinema was a negative one.  You’d be wrong;  before all our gear was stolen, there were some awesome afternoons spent in the Wavy Gravy house of horrors trying to capture our idea on tape.  The principal piece of music I’d come up with for the movie was something called “Sebastien’s Theme”, named after one of the eleventy-six principal characters in the film whose name I could remember.  I quite liked the general melody I’d come up with, but our lead guitarist and principal engineering nerd Rui really outdid himself on this one, adding an absolutely stunningly beautiful lead line that flowed over the entire piece and turned it into the most beautiful and haunting thing we had ever written.  At one point in the recording process, we discovered (quite by accident) that by turning up Rui’s amplifier to a truly Spinal Tap-esque volume level, certain passages of the line Rui had written were actually causing the entire Wavy Gravy house to literally resonate in sympathy with the tone generated, which sympathetic vibrations in turn permitted the strings to themselves vibrate in sympathy, creating an unusual and continuous tone with lots of sustain.  In person, while the passages were being recorded, it was rather like standing next to an aircraft engine that was being manipulated to play passages of Bach;  I am not exaggerating a single bit when I tell you that, at one point that afternoon I was over half a block away from the Wavy Gravy House and walking down the street to get a re-supply of cigarettes but I could CLEARLY hear the passage being played over the sounds of streetcars rumbling by on Queen Street East.  Oh yes, it was loud.  On the tape, though, the sound that we captured from Rui’s guitar/aircraft engine – severely attenuated and processed with a few electronics – sounded a lot like some kind of strange woodwind instrument that had the ability to morph from a peaceful round timbre into a strident and passionate wail.  The effect we achieved in recording that song was an accident born of equal parts experimentation and blind luck; of all the things we did, it’s one of my favourites.

Half a dozen years later, I was permanently retired from the life of an active and creative musician, but I didn’t know it yet.  I was fooling around with some video editing software (taking another gig, it turns out, was the right idea from a “making enough money to feed myself and purchase high tech toys” perspective).  I had been screwing around with some nature clips that I’d taken while on a fishing trip and I got the idea to try and slap together a kind of a music video for the tune.  I never thought anyone else would see it – this was back in ye olden days of 2003 before the YouTubination of the planet – so it’s got some rough spots (I think it’s fairly obvious that, in a couple of sections, I simply didn’t have any other footage that fit the “subject” requirements.  Watching it again for the first time in a couple of years the other day, I would do quite a few things differently if I was putting the piece together again.  Still, I enjoyed it enough to talk myself into broadcasting it to the world via YouTube.

Here then, is Sebastien’s Theme.  I don’t know if the other guys in the band have even ever seen this;  but that’s a story for another day.

Right now, I am not liking Mats Sundin or Frank Mahovlich very much, because they are both getting in the way of my own Maple Leaf Gardens story.  So here it is:  I played hockey at Maple Leaf Gardens – once.

No, my name is not George Abbott.

In the fall of 1992, I was living the life of a young man in his mid-twenties in the City of Toronto.   I was single;  not necessarily by choice, but through circumstance, most notably the circumstance that no girls of the female persuasion wanted to spend much time talking to me.  I was starting to earn a little money after finishing years of school as a result of a  ridiculously time-consuming desk job that I had.  With a little extra spending money in my pockets and not a hope in hell of ever spending any of that money on a date, I did what any one of you would have done:  I dedicated my life to s becoming the most accomplished journeyman beer-league hockey player that ever was.

First, a word on my talent.  I had none.  My skating style, it must be said, left one the residual impression of an epileptic man with his shoes on fire attempting to escape a pack of attacking dogs.   As far as puck-handling skills, what I lacked in razzle, I was doubly bereft of dazzle.   I was (and still am) entirely unable to execute a slap shot.  On the rare occasions that I happened to find myself, through sheer coincidence, at the same end of the ice as the puck, my lone offensive weapon was a wrist shot whose principal virtue was the sheer mystery surrounding the possible trajectory of the puck upon its departure from the profoundly illegal curve on my stick blade.  I know that you dismiss this self-deprecating assessment of my prowess;  I sense you wondering how it is possible that I, the startlingly awesome Junior, could be such an endless wellspring of suck in any area of worthy endeavour.   Well, it’s true.   On one occasion,  I found myself standing in the opposition goaler’s crease with the puck on my stick.  Every other player on the ice, including the opposing goaltender, had been knocked to the ice, I believe as a result of a series of brief and highly localized earthquakes.  Situated approximately two and a half feet from the goal line, without a single opposing player between myself and the yawning cage, I quickly assessed the situation.  There was no one available to pass to, so that option was out.  I was going to have to take a shot.  The aforementioned opposition goalie was not only not blocking my target, but far out of his crease: he was in the corner, flat on his back and without his stick.  In future years, this would come to be known by hockey fans around the world as the “Andrew Raycroft” position.   The unfortunate goaler’s paddle lay on the ice between myself and the abandoned cage, which meant that I was going to have to raise the puck at least a half an inch if I was going to deposit the biscuit in the basket.  Over the course of approximately the next six or seven minutes, I lined up the shot much like Tiger Woods would assess a putt on the 17th green at Augusta.  I addressed the puck lying motionless at my feet and thought, “top shelf, where they keep the peanut butter”.  Like all great snipers, I inhaled, closed my eyes, and unleashed my most fearsome wrister, which rose up from the ice like a wounded goose taking flight.  The shot wobbled skywards at an 82-degree angle, sailed high over the crossbar and, in a slow and graceful arc drifted over the glass at the end of the rink, plonking carelessly to the floor somewhere near a startled teenager with a six-year old hot dog he’d just purchased from the concession stand.

So I wasn’t what you would call a conventional talent.  I was a grinder, a fourth-line scrub with plenty of heart and the most aggressively odiferous hockey equipment you will ever have the supreme misfortune to smell.  What I did have to offer the discerning rec-league general manager looking to assemble a team was a fistful of cash and my rock-solid and highly believable commitment to actually show up for games, given that there was so much time that I wasn’t spending with my non-existent girlfriend, not to mention the extreme improbability of that situation changing at any time in the future.

I played with a lot of teams:  guys that I worked with, guys that I had gone to school with, friends of friends; I even joined one team that was composed entirely of complete strangers:  we were the “unaffiliated individuals” of Chesswood D-division men’s summer league hockey, bound together by nothing at all and unified by our complete and utter lack of any knowledge about one another.  It is the only hockey team I’ve ever seen whose uniforms featured nametags on the front rather than surnames across the shoulders.   In all, I played with my various squads something like five times a week on a regular basis, with the occasional additional afternoon game of pickup or morning shinny thrown in.

One of the guys I played with knew a group of guys from the Kitchener-Waterloo/Cambridge area, many of whom had been playing sports of one kind or another with and against each other since two days before God’s parents were born.   The KW/Cambridge group had a tradition of getting together a game of shinny once a year at a special location, and one of those guys knew a guy who knew a guy who once saw a guy that knew a guy who had heard of a person that worked in some capacity at Maple Leaf Gardens.  In those days, apparently, the Leafs only rented out the ice in the old barn to the public one or two weekends a year for reasons that were explained to me at time and which i am now going to identify, perhaps even correctly, as having to do with the extreme demand upon the ice and building staff.  Whatever the reality of the situation, as a result of the very close ties between this KW/Cambridge group and MLG, they managed to get one of the coveted slots.   A few short weeks’ worth of begging, car washing, harassing telephone calls and tearful tantrums later, my buddy and I were invited to join them on the fateful afternoon.

When the day finally came, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face all day.  It started when I packed my equipment up, marking the only time in history that any human being exhibited any signs of pleasure or contentment whatsoever while situated within thirty yards of my fetid gear.   As I collected my rank paraphenalia and zipped it into my bag, Paul Morris’ voice filled my head, announcing the fifth of my goals as the fans in the greys rose to their feet in full-throated yell.  I drove to the rink in a virtual fog;  in my mind, I was a pro, it was Saturday afternoon, and I was driving down to the Gardens – the hallowed ground – to do battle not with a bunch of out-of-shape beer drinkers, but rather as a member of my beloved Leafs facing off against the hated Detroit Red Wings.  I paid the twenty bucks to park at a lot on Carlton street within sight of MLG because I wanted to savour the moment of throwing my bag over my shoulder, sticks in hand, and walking down the sidewalk toward the front door at 60 Carlton.

As I have written elsewhere, I have been a Leafs fan all my life, and these were heady times for the Blue and White:  Harold Ballard was (and still is, to the best of my knowledge) dead; Wendel Clark was finally taking to the ice on a regular basis, having triumphed over a series of knee injuries, back woes, and international communism;  and Steve Stavro, the owner of the club, was trying to restore some semblance of respectability to the storied franchise by attempting to win hockey games – he did this by continuing to sell groceries and count his money, staying out of the fucking way of the smart hockey people he’d hired to take care of his hockey team.  In January of that year, Cliff Fletcher had proved to everyone in the world that Doug Risebrough is an idiot, bringing “Killer” Gilmour, Ric Nattress, Jamie Macoun, Rick Wamsley and Kent Manderville to the Leafs for a bag of pucks and a box of paperclips.  Later that year, the Leafs would reach the Conference Finals only to lose Game 7 when some guy named Gretzky played the greatest game of his life and managed to bank a puck in from behind the net off a startled Dave Ellet’s skate.  As I said, I’ve been a Leafs fan all my life, and I began following the team as a kid growing up in Windsor, Ontario, idolizing Dave Keon, Darryl Sittler, Borje Salming and Lanny McDonald from a distance.  There was no one to idolize in the early 80′s, so I spent that time pretending that the NHL didn’t exist and that the New York Islanders were winning Stanley Cups in a made-for-TV movie that was produced for entertainment purposes only.  In later years, I attended university in Hogtown, and spent four years sneaking down to the Gardens whenever possible on Saturday night, waiting ’til the game had begun and then trying to find a scalper with a surplus single ticket that I could get for below cost.  I saw a lot of games from the blues at the south end of the rink that way, and every time I walked into that building I was a kid again – the pictures lining the wall in the corridors and beside the escalators were of the people and places I had read about and dreamed about in books and magazines throughout my life.  The place just sweat history like Raj Binder in a remake of Cool Hand Luke.

I was thinking about all of these things as I strode along the sidewalk, chills racing up and down my spine, staring at the Marquee on the front of the building and striding – for the first and only time in my life – through the door and into Maple Leaf Gardens as a player.   Some of the guys were in the front lobby awaiting our MLG hosts to arrive and escort us to the changing room.  I dropped my gear to the floor and we all tried to act casual, some guys sipping coffee, while we all tried not to be detected as we excitedly looked around.  There was a passageway to the gold seats right in the centre of the south end of the rink through which you could see to the ice surface;  only some of the lights were on, so the great shrine was half-darkened.  The ice was pristine, and the building empty, but in my mind the nets were not standing cold and blue in dusky and cavernous silence, they were the centre of a warm, yellow TV-lit storm as a goal-mouth scramble unfolded in my mind.  With visions of my arms upraised over an overtime winner and my Maple Leaf teammates joyously patting me on the helmet, sticks upraised, we followed our guide to the dressing room – alas, not the room used by my heroes, but another room behind the visitors bench that I believe was once used as the visitors’ dressing room.   As we all dressed hurriedly, someone wise and full of forethought reminded us that once we got on the ice we ought not succumb to temptation and start flicking pucks high into the empty stands, because the stands were – and would remain – empty, so we’d run out of pucks, which would kind of be an incredibly stupid reason to delay our game at Maple Leaf Gardens.

The time came, and we strode out of the room, through the tunnel and up the gently sloping ramp toward the bench, where we emerged among the gold seats.  In an instant, I had leapt through the open door and began skating as fast as I could across the surface.  In my head, the organ was churning, the fans were chanting, and it was Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.  One look at the rest of the guys on the ice confirmed for me that they were all thinking the exact same thing.   Incredibly, cameras emerged from the hidden recesses of hockey pants, though these are not (to my knowledge) manufactured in any configuration that includes pockets.   Flashes popped and guys good-naturedly jostled with one another to have their picture taken facing off with their buddy over the famous blue Leaf at centre ice.

Every one of us flipped a puck up over the boards and into the stands.

Before long, we tossed our sticks in a pile at centre ice.  Teams were chosen by one fellow who was kind of the organizey guy of us all by randomly distributing lumber towards each end of the rink.  I can’t remember if I was on the “dark” or “white” team, but I do know that as the game got under way,  I took my place on the Leaf (!) bench and waited for my first shift.

I will never forget the rush of excitement I felt as the lines rolled over once and I knew that my turn was coming.  The play seemed to scramble back and forth interminably;  finally, the second-line left winger, who I had the honour and duty of replacing on the ice, could no longer get any oxygen and decided (after a short six-minute shift) that he ought to seek re-inforcements.   As he staggered toward the bench like a zombie in molasses, I took a deep breath and tried to stop shaking with excitement.  I stood up and casually hopped over the boards.

Almost.

In my excitement and haste, I apparently forgot to lift my trailing foot quite high enough in the air.  The toe of my right skate thumped off the top of the boards and I fell straight down onto the ice in a heap.   I remember absolutely nothing else about my first shift on the ice.

I do know that at one point in the game, the puck was on my stick in the high slot (it is possible that many of the players were drinking heavily before the game – I do not know how otherwise to explain the occurrence of this anomalous circumstance).  Drawing on my previous shooting experience, I closed my eyes much tighter than before and unleashed a Wendelesque laser beam that clanged off the iron behind the opposing netminder and came out the other side.   I remember that I found the ice surface quite large, especially when it was time to backcheck – in this way, my style of play somewhat presaged that of Sergei Berezin.   I remember sitting hunched over on the bench, with one glove draped over the top of the boards and the other gripping the shaft of my stick, sweat rolling down from my forehead, then dripping from the tip of my nose on to the rubber mats at our feet and thinking about how the sweat from my brow was mingling on the floor with the sweat of my heroes.  Really, I’m not kidding around here;  I actually had that thought as I was sitting watching the game and trying not to cough up a lung.

The one other thing I remember about the game is a defensive zone scramble along the left wing side.  This is where untalented defensive-minded fourth line muckers such as myself earn our bread and butter.  I skated determinedly in to the fray from my defensive station along the boards.  The puck was loose but being contested by one of my opponents near the faceoff dot.  As I strode toward the loose puck, I saw that I would get there before the attacker.  I also saw that I was going to need to find an escape route quickly, because he was a much larger person than myself, and (it almost doesn’t bear mentioning) a much better player.  I collected the puck and began turning to my right, towards the boards, trying to curl around quickly and lead a rush back up ice.  As I turned around and began heading back up ice, I noticed another attacker bearing down on me quickly, pinching me towards the boards.  I kept skating, fading to my left in hopes of squeezing between my tormentor and the boards, then finding myself with an open path to the offensive zone.  Too late, I realized that it was not to be.  My attacker closed on me quickly, curled alongside me and leaned forward, lunging for the puck on my stick.   I attempted to duck under his outstretched arm and continue up the left wing boards.  It didn’t work and with a crunch, I hit the boards.  My opponent’s upper arm hit me in the helmet, and my neck was forced to tilt my head forward and to the left.  With a thud, I cracked my forehead off the top of the yellow plastic dasher, the surface at the top of the boards where it joins with the glass.  The two of us crumpled to the ice together in a tangle of arms, legs and no puck;  it had bounced away – fortuitously, to one of my teammates who could actually skate, and my side began an attack up ice.  As I rose to my feet, I felt a warm fluid over my left eyebrow;  I removed my glove, reached up and wiped at my forehead with my bare right hand.  As I drew my hand away and started to skate up ice to follow the attack, I caught a glimpse of blood on my fingers.  A quick glimpse at the dasher board confirmed that there was a little bloodstain there from the fresh wound to my coconut.

I circled to the bench.   As I approached, i caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass at the top of the boards.  The smile on my face was about six feet wide.

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¹I suggest that from here on in, Leaf fans and members of the Barilkosphere use the term “Clark” as a grouping noun to refer to “seventeen” of anything.