Congenial-speak #7

Musing on the subtext of my May bound political memoir, I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

Props

Someone was riding my bike. A freshly adroit kid who could. I think around the time—rounding off to the third week of March in 1971—when I had my shed lesson. I had come home from an eight-week hospital stay following an MVA that severely limited my sense of balance. I was taken, after insisting that I could still ride, to the garage and set on the bicycle I rode at first meeting when I was four. It had been a little over a year since that first meeting, and I was worse for the wear.

My dad set my on the bike and I could not even sit on the seat. In later months, as I sat atop giant therapy balls in PT, it became clear to me that, largely, I was a pawn to the law of gravity. Anything, that I had mastered by five-years-old, that required sustained balance, was something no amount of ball-sitting, or walking parallel bars could recoup.

For a few weeks after my garage defeat, the bike I'd patrolled the neighborhood on, that I coasted down Oak Grove's hill on, whose spokes I'd clipped baseball cards to, sat there in its spot in the garage. And then one day it was gone, sold or donated.

But I had a hockey stick and skates somewhere. When I was four my sister and I went for skating lessons at Bremar arena in Edina, MN. It must have begun as figure skating. The lessons ended with a show in which sis and I were penguins. (We later reprised our guises in a costume contest on the SS France, winning first prize.) I played hockey though. Glimmers of blades and pieces of puck pepper my mind. I have no idea what happened to the skates. They were not a pair of shoes I'd ever grow into again. I out grew them and I assume they were passed to the next aspiring biracial hockey star.

I held on to the stick though. I can very well image it in my head, boarded along the basement wall with two other floor hockey sticks, a real puck, a red and a black plastic one. There was a goal too. A friend, really the only friend I ever bothered to make on Lyndale Avenue, and I played floor hockey on the small, uncarpeted expanse between the play-room and the laundry room. We set the netted goal and one end opposing the wheeled laundry basket the stood beneath a chute. I dribbled puckishly the best I could. At ten-years-old I was still chasing the puck more than I had six years before.

My friend had a kidney-bean shaped below-ground pool. It was in his family's wood fenced deck area. In the winter it was left half-full and bore with natural snow-froze goals at either end. I brought the real stick over, the one from a prior neighborhood, a childhood, a former aspiration. It never got worn like every other young Richfield Spartan, splintering with blistered strains in sanded wooded grains always trained to go with their handler. On one hand it was capped in shinny rubber, a lined design that figured in NHL, a last tip to secure the grasp tested in a wrist shot. Or maybe a more aggressive slap shot that came from further down, hand under hand along the new resplendent feel, to the blade. Mine never acquired the chews. It never earned the dents, the bends those Fremont kids in Sorels and straight peaked maroon Richfield hats had. Still, my blade was wrapped in black electrical tape, protecting its durability, promoting the impossibility that it would ever be engaged in play with the necessary roughness to hurt it.

In high school I, in true non-conformist fashion, went outside the district to join a team. I had some say in naming our team the South Suburban Silver Bullets. I think we practiced at Elliot school. Players from Bloomington, Richfield, most suburbs in south of Edina comprised our team. We played floor hockey at a loss, in the beginning. I found a niche, the team finally found its synchronicity, its eclecticism, our idiosyncrasies. Teamwork, eye for an eye, check for a disabled body check. The team was adaptive and most played from electric wheelchairs. I was a cocky, muscled, smitten seventeen-yer-old. The fragile effervescent presence of a blonde girl with a bone condition did not help. My anger vented, my testosterone fought to contain itself and play a fair game The other teams played on a mental field when the physical came up short. A boom-box in 1982 played Survivor's “Eye of the Tiger.” They talked smack and said “We're gonna waste em'.” They knew their limitations though. A opponent on clutches fell over, trying to saunter out of the gymnasium, and quipped, “I can't help it if I have shitty balance.” I thought, this is me ten years ago.