This memory never gets old

With all of the uncertainty and concern of the COVID-19 situation, I decided to write about something to take your mind, and mine, off of everything surrounding us. With so many developments and things changing day to day, sometimes hour to hour, I decided to write about a constant in my life — my dad.

Monday happened to be my dad’s birthday.

On my Facebook there were lots of notifications about my dad Alain — or Al, as many of you call him — in my daily memories. I was once again reminded of the incident from many years ago when he was driving my son Justin and my mom Marie all over Dartmouth in search of the Gray Arena, where my son Jacob was playing hockey.

Dad may be getting old, but this story never does.

Mom and Dad were usually early birds when it came to arriving at rinks, so the fact they hadn’t arrived yet seemed off.

And so I called. The conversation went downhill very fast.

“We’re lost!” said my mom, who answered the phone. They couldn’t find the Gray Arena, and they weren’t familiar with Dartmouth so they couldn’t even tell me where they were. Oh boy.

I tried again — unsuccessfully — to give Mom directions on the phone, while I could hear my dad in the background asking directions of someone they had seen on the street or in a parking lot.

It reminded me of that commercial from back in the day — “Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?” — except that they weren’t looking for mustard.

Eventually, Jacob’s hockey game had started and Justin needed to go to Bridgewater for a tournament so I told my parents to cut their losses and head for the South Shore. My sister was able to talk them out of Dartmouth.

So why did this come up on my Facebook memories on Monday? That year for his birthday I gave dad a GPS and programmed the addresses of all of the rinks he needed in it — including the Gray Arena on Monique Avenue in Dartmouth. My parents were going to be bringing Justin to a tournament and this rink was on the schedule.

My dad opened the box and took out the GPS. He kept swiping his finger across the screen and pushing on it. It’s then I realized that the GPS might not be the answer to all of our rink problems.

“That’s not the screen,” I said. “That’s a sticker on the screen.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought that was the screen.”

The first game of the tournament a couple of weeks later I spoke to my parents and that’s when the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

“We drove past this a couple of times last time. We saw it but it wasn’t grey so we didn’t stop,” my dad said. Huh?

“You said it was a grey arena,” he said. “We were looking for a grey arena.”

I told them they were looking for Gray Arena, not a grey arena.

But even my son Justin admonished me. It had been weeks since his two-hour hopeless tour of Dartmouth. He still seemed bitter.

“You said it was a grey arena. It’s yellow!” he exclaimed. “I never said it was grey,” I said. “You also never said it was yellow!” he said.

For the record, the full name of the arena was the Gerald B. Gray Memorial Arena. Perhaps I should have told them to look for that.

Or, at the very least, to look for the yellow Gray Arena.

Then again, this memory is the birthday gift that keeps on giving.