EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

“Car!”

Geoffrey Moore, you’re playing in the street again.

When I was growing up in Montreal, any pickup game of hockey on any surface was known as “shinny.” Shinny is an entry in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary although it floats like some lazy players between “shinleaf = PYROLA (a wintergreen)” and “shin pad” on page 1335, its etymology mysterious. The kids on my street in Edmonton play “road hockey” or “ball hockey.” Perhaps shinny is a regional word, eastern Canadian - unlike “pop” or “soda” for what a Montreal boy like me knew as a “soft drink.”

The neighbourhood is in the midst of a period of transition. Every block is now dotted with subdivided lots occupied by nondescript skinny infills. A breakthrough in contemporary home design is the reinvention of the box. Younger families are staking out the turf ceded by downsizing empty nesters. The infants of entrenched families are now fully grown urchins. I love the activity and the racket, the street life.

Some of the kids around here know and like me. I’ve been reminded of how much I delighted in the infrequent and always impromptu company of the adults on the street I grew up on back in the 60s. This persistent memory compelled me to join two road hockey games last week. I did not feel like an intruder and I felt like a kid in my Montreal Canadiens sweater brandishing a relic, my wood Sher-Wood P.M.P. 6030, its blade taped heel to toe as it must be although I never knew why except that’s what Montreal Canadiens players did when I was young and star-struck and they should know.

I was the best player on the asphalt and the oldest too, by 50 years. My nearest rival was an adolescent girl whose rising stickhandling skills are close to surpassing my faded ones – provided she works on them. And she’s not savvy yet. It didn’t occur to her to surreptitiously shrink the distance between her team’s fir bough goalposts. A scrum of exuberant shinny kids means high sticks; I was careful to stand well back of the scrimmages, I’ve come this far without losing an eye or tooth to an errant hockey stick. My new shinny injuries are minor, all lower body, a bruised big toe, a scraped knee and a pulled groin.

My game was head fakes and stretch passes or blind backhand passes in the offensive zone. Strange and amazing how the simple physics of athletic play, unconscious motor skills, come right back – even if they’re a little off, dulled by disuse. A baseball throw is almost always to a stationary target. A hockey pass (and a football pass) is almost always intended for a moving target. The neighbourhood kids haven’t quite got ahead of themselves on this subtlety of the game yet. I refrained from volunteering any number of “pro” tips because sometimes fun should just be fun, plain and simple.

A highlight of my advertising career was a particular afternoon when I telephoned a printer and shouted, “Stop the presses!” It was no less of a thrill to yell “Car!” and then “Game on!” for the first time in decades.     

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source for sports since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.