‘Sonshine’: Warm hearts and cold hockey games
I have an image in my mind. Once, when he was little and we were driving somewhere, my son took my right hand from where it was perched on the console, and held on to my middle finger like it was some kind of anchor. Maybe a talisman.
I can’t recall that image and not fill up with its power. Him in the front seat, peering out the window, letting nothing escape his notice. Me, driving, secretly grinning.
It was years ago, before the little kids-in-a-rear-car-seat rules. Inspired by the image, I wrote a poem, now lost to memory and time, stored in a drawer or the basement somewhere.
I do recall one line though: Holding my finger like he holds my heart.
“Sonshine,” I called the poem. I waited for it to happen again, on our way to see family, or run errands. (No house calls though; his older sister got that job). When he was a little older, we discovered his skills in hockey; our driving together was often to practice and games. When he was older still, the drives took us to tournaments, in places away from the house calls and office hours. Sadly, there was no finger holding past the tyke stage, a small price to pay for watching the little tyke become the boy, the boy become the teen, the teen become the man.
And the man, fast forward a bit, become a father.
He has two boys. Our younger grandson has his own interests and loves.
Our older grandson got that hockey gene, the one that makes you get up at 6 a.m. and strap on skates. There is this one indisputable fact about hockey: you have to really love it to play it. It does have its downsides.
Last month for example, we spent a weekend in Buffalo, at our grandson’s hockey tournament, at a way less-than-five-star hotel, with overpriced American-dollar room rates. Kids screaming up and down the hallway in the evening; the parents only slightly quieter. The seats in the arena colder than an Antarctic winter. And the piece de non-resistance: terrible coffee in a Styrofoam cup.
Sound awful? No way. Those tournaments are fun, tap into more nostalgia than a dozen scrap books. Psychologists say that we go along our life as though walking on the surface, like on a dirt path.
Picture our day-to-day lives, moving from one errand or job to another, maybe driving from one hockey arena to another. But beneath the ground, miles down, lie our emotions. And we, human as we are, fall into them. They’re there, waiting, constant; it’s the what happens on the surface that changes. Even hockey-watching has its surface: the camaraderie of the parents, strangers for the most part, thrown together by their kids. The cheering of the enthusiastic, hyperpartisan crowds (our guys are cowbell ringers. I also have first-ear experience with truck-horn blowers and owners of gravel-filled Javex bottles). The conversation beforehand (“I hear the next team is unbeatable!”). Trying to link the kids’ numbers with their names, the names with the positions, the kids with their parents. And this: the Tim Hortons (not, thank you very much, in a Styrofoam cup).
But mostly it’s this. My grandson. In the middle of a game the other day, he skated — danced, actually — in front of his parents and us. He gave us the briefest of smiles, and a wave of recognition.
“You’re here. That’s good,” the smile said, just like his dad’s finger holding decades before, plunging me miles deep into that emotion.
What to call it? Nostalgia for sure. And something more, something much deeper; let’s call it love of family. Perhaps “sonshine.”
I’ll leave you with this last image. Him, the cool teen, after a game. A last-minute out-the-door hug, bending down to provide a quick squeeze around my neck. Him, offering a few words in my ear, “Thanks for coming, Papa. Love you.” Me, hugging him back, secretly grinning.