Winter Reruns -Bog Hockey

[Editor’s Note: I wrote this a year ago. I’m assuming the regular readers are like me and can’t remember what you had for dinner last night, so you’re primed to read it again. The rest of you need to know about Bog Hockey]
{Author’s Note: There is no editor}
This picture is a lot older than I am. Probably thirty years older. But it is an exact rendering of my winter life in our little suburb — check that– exurb — check that — that word didn’t exist then– out in the sticks where we lived in the sixties.

I was born in Boston. When I was but small, we moved into the country. And my life was amazingly different from my cousins who remained in the city.

We didn’t have any money, really, but not so’s you’d notice. We lived in a little house on a little plot in a little neighborhood, and had little, salubrious lives. Our mother would turn us out of doors, no matter the season, and we’d take our battered belongings, pool them, and play self -organized sports. We’d sort out the teams, and the rules, and the size and shape of the playing surface, and rarely quarrelled, unless it seemed like more fun than playing any more. And we could have sorted out the Mideast thing, if they’d let us. Maybe their quarrelling is more fun than they let on.

In the summer, we’d play baseball, and have to mow the field before playing. Right field’s an out! In the winter, we’d play basketball in the elementary school gym. Shirts and skins. Onlookers were no doubt sorely tempted to play xylophone on many of the skins team’s ribs. Weight training was still far in the future. In the fall, we’d play tackle football in a cow pasture with no equipment. There were no hash marks or goal lines demarcated, of course, but in a field recently used by ruminant animals, those weren’t the things on the ground you would have been keeping an eye out for anyway. And in the winter, we’d dress in wool, gather our rusting hand-me-down skates that lacked steel toes, grab the sticks that were generally broken and discarded and then repaired with electrical tape, and we’d shamble on down to LaFleur’s Pond, and get up a game. The idea of actually owning and wearing a replica of the sweater worn by our local professional hockey team was as remote and mystical as a strawberry on the kitchen table in the winter.

We were always half frozen with the cold. We had no protective gear of any kind. Hell, at the time, there was only one professional hockey player who wore a helmet — Terrible Teddy Green– and he only wore it because he’d already had his head staved in from a stick fight, and needed to protect the steel plate in his head from any further persuasion. When we first started going to Boston Garden to see Bobby Orr’s mighty Bruins play, some of the goalies weren’t wearing masks yet.

The ice was never really frozen properly, one way or the other. If it was thick enough to be safe, it was so corrugated it would rattle your teeth out of your head. If it was fresh enough to offer a smooth surface, it was thin enough to drown you. We always skated anyway. If you got checked, you’d occasionally slide to the margins of the pond, get caught in the brambles reaching up through the ice, get tangled up, and fall in up to your waist, and you’d spend the rest of the day skating with your pants frozen to your legs. You wouldn’t stop.

“NO LIFTING!” you’d shout every time the more adept stickhandlers would get the puck up off the ice and crack your shins. We’d all readily and solemnly agree that there’d be no lifting, before we began each game, of course; some of us because we knew we were incapable of lifting it, and the others because they were incapable of not lifting it, so no one was much put out by the bargain.

We’d put two sticks five feet apart on the ice to mark out the goal, and get to it. Guys who never passed at basketball never passed at hockey either, we noticed. And they’d forever be taking shots from fifty yards from the goal, missing by fifty yards, and requiring a ticklish trip to the brambles to fetch the errant puck without swimming amongst the prickers.

When we got older, we’d fashion real nets out of scavenged lumber and chicken wire, and without fail we’d forget to fetch them off the ice in time for spring thaw, and we’d see them, on the bottom like scuttled privateers, winking at us beneath the new year’s ice.

I wanted to be a goalie, but had no equipment. My father drove an old Rambler Station Wagon. Underneath the carpet in the back, there was — check that — there originally was a layer of foam rubber.
My brother and I spent many a miserable car ride rolling around in the back of the car with only the thin carpet between us and the rivets and bolt heads because I cut the pad up into rectangles, wove olive drab straps from army surplus utility belts through slits in the foam, tied them to my legs, and played the net like that.

At the time, the Bruins had a goalie named Gerry Cheevers. He was cool. He wore a white plastic mask, and he’d draw the stitches he would have received had he not worn the mask right on it, in magic marker, adding one every time he got hit in the face. He looked fierce like that. Young boys like fierce. So I tried to fashion one for myself out of the plastic scavenged from a Clorox bottle, held on my head with an elastic band, and burned my face with the residue of the bleach. The plastic was as thin as a negligee, and wouldn’t protect me in any case; I didn’t care, I wore it anyway.

And some of the kids were real good. A few played college hockey. One played on the Olympic Team and the Bruins and is now an NHL coach. But by the time he had started coming around, there was a real rink next to the high school to play in. Real equipment started to show up. Right handed goalies didn’t use their brother’s left handed hand-me-down baseball glove and bleach bottle mask and Rambler foam as equipment. Time marched on, and the younger kid’s parents started getting up at 3:00 AM to make it to the rink for their allotted ice time, supplanting the older kid’s ritual: mothers sticking their heads out the back door when the light got weak and the sun skimmed the horizon, painting at the last only the very tops of the dormant oaks that ringed the pond with the winter dusk’s fire, shouting your name to call you to dinner.

My son played hockey on the Playstation once. Didn’t care for it.

Winter Re-Runs

[Editor’s Note: There’s lots of new readers around today. I’m always amazed at how many people follow links on prominent webpages like Althouse. So I’m reprinting this from last year, hoping to explain what’s what around here]
{Author’s Note: There is no editor}

Do you labor in the vineyard of creativity? Most people do, whether they consider it creative or not. There’s a lot less drudgery in the work world lately, and take it from someone who’s actually dug ditches: a modern ditchdigger is driving a backhoe that costs more than a Lexus, is conversant in simple geology, hydraulics, physics, mathematics, explosives, and small engine repair, and he’s talking to his brethren on a cell phone while laying out the ditch with a laser level, or perhaps Global Positioning Satellite data. He’s usually aware of both current and ancient water, sewer, drainage, telephone, electrical and data line burial practices. And if something unforeseen and unfortunate happens, he knows CPR too. And he knows the spread of the Ravens/Giants game to boot. What does an Ivy League Liberal Arts professor know, exactly?

I make furniture. There’s drudgery there too, like any job, but you can use a complementary mixture of your head, heart, and hand more than you can in most work. I prefer the tangible arts, because there’s a framework that you improvise inside, and it actually allows a greater range of expression than if their are no rules, even though that seems counterintuitive.

At least it seems to seem counterintuitive to that Ivy League professor I mentioned earlier. A football game has lots of rules, for instance, mountains of them, many obscure. The teams prepare game plans for a week at least, to work within these rigid guidelines against a known opponent. They script their plays, and try to predict their opponent’s script. Then they blow the whistle, and all hell breaks loose. The rules don’t stop inprovisation, and no two football games look very much alike, not for very long, anyway. If there were no rules, people would have to stop and decide everything, and so nothing much would happen, and very little would happen in quick succession, except fistfights over the “decidin,'” and that’s hockey, not football.

Furniture has rules. They boil down to three: Is it sturdy? Is it comfortable? Is it beautiful? Some call it: commodity, firmness, and delight. There are many subsets of rules, of course; the average human is 18″ wide at the shoulder and kitchen counters are hard to make bread dough on if they’re higher than eye level. But never mind complexity, get the three rules right, and you’re in high cotton.

There’s a mindset that’s de rigeur these days that rules are for schmucks. (See Ivy League Professor) Do your own thing, man, be creative. My little son’s teacher demands that he write complicated and flowery prose, while refusing to teach him to read or write or spell. The rules will just get in the way of creativity, she thinks.

What utter bosh. Michaelangelo Buonnarotti Simoni painted some interesting things, and he labored under plenty of constraints, including: Don’t piss off your patron, he can have you killed AND excommunicated. It didn’t seem to take much off his fastball. But let’s give the Rousseau “Noble Savage” wannabes the benefit of the doubt. Let’s imagine we let the old chiseler off the hook from Pope Julius. Paint what ever you want, Mikie. Do you really think he’d paint something better than the Sistine Chapel? Why stop there? Let’s take it as far as modern artists do. Why not have Michaelangelo paint with his feet, using yogurt instead of paint, and a toilet brush for his stylus? That should free up his creative juices, huh? Don’t like the sound of that? What are you, square?

As I was saying, commodity, firmness, and delight. Sounds easy enough. Let’s see you do it. It’s easy to blaze a trail if you start out by saying wheels should be square instead of round, or made from spaghetti. You’ll get Yoko Ono sized plaudits in the art magazines for that, but the cart still won’t go. Your mission, if you live in that world, is to find a patron that wants an odd useless cart. And has a trust fund too.

Forget all that. Let’s see you carry the rules on your back lightly, like an angel on your shoulder, or heavy, like a rucksack filled with brass knobs– whatever is your lot in life — and make the trip to creativity. Let’s see you do it for a price. Let’s see you make another person — or even better – many people, happy and comfortable and safe for a little while. Let’s see you do it on time. Let’s see you please yourself, and the rest of the world, and maybe throw your little all into the mixer of meaning that is posterity, and have it stick, maybe just a little.

Sometimes, I think I did it a little, and it makes me content.

I’m Still Too Busy To Write. Here’s A Picture Of A Filling Station I Built

I love this picture. It reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting. The Mobil canopy won a bunch of design awards, both here and in Europe, and deserved every one of them. That place screams: bright, clean, safe –pull right in. A filling station is an industrial building and looks appropriate in that mode. People have lost their minds, and try to make their own kitchens look industrial, and then go to planning board meetings and demand that service stations put peaked roofs and shingles on their canopies.

By the way, in the oil business, they never call it gas. It’s called “product.”

I told you I’ve built every damn thing. If I’m busy again tomorrow, you’re getting pictures of the football stadium. No, not that one. The small one.

I’m Busy. Here’s A Picture Of A House.

I’ve built a lot of different things over the years.

The term “built” is nebulous. The owner of the house builds it, but doesn’t do anything except write checks until their hands bleed. The designer usually stops after the lines are on the paper. The general contractor generally rides herd over the whole mess, and is often a framing contractor around New England. The rest is subcontractors, or “specialty” contractors, who don’t know very much about everything, but know a great deal about what ever it is they do.

I used to work at large commercial contractor, and there were people there that had been working at “building” things their whole lives, and had never seen one of them. They never left the office.

I make furniture now, and like it. But we were out on Christmas Day, visiting for the holiday, and we went to the house in the picture. It’s perhaps the best expression of whatever talent I have at building my favorite thing to build – a house. And if anybody can claim to have “built” a house, I can claim this one. I paused in the driveway, and for a minute I remembered the scratching on the paper, and the spreadsheets, and the permits, and the framing, and the painting, and trim, and … well, I remembered all the effort I put into that place; remembered all at once. It might be a better example of the most gratifying work I’ve ever done than even my own house. It still looks neat as a pin eight years later.

In three hundred years, that house might still be there. Someone might find the business card I pitched into the space between the stringers just before I nailed the stairtreads home. Will they think: “I wish that guy was alive today to build me another house”? Or will they wish I was there to get a scolding for a missed nail, or a crooked stud I should have burned instead of nailed?

I don’t know. But I do know I wouldn’t have thrown my name in there, if I didn’t care about what I was doing.

Thanks

I’m busy making furniture today. Actually, “busy” doesn’t cover it. “Going like hell commensurate with not forgetting one table leg out of four or being called ‘lefty’ or ‘old one-eyed stumpy’ for the remainder of your life” is more like it.

But you’re all so nice, I need to thank you for visiting and commenting and buying furniture, and for all your expressions of goodwill and holiday cheer. And hey! we actually got presents for Christmas from some people. So thank you — you all deserve a Russian Kiss from Pat et Stanley:

Merry Christmas, Everybody Everywhere

They were standing in the rubble of a world gone mad. Finally they stood over the stricken bully, exulting only that the thing was done, and offered their hand again to all that would take it. Like all decent people, they did what they had to do, then shrugged and decided to get back to the real business at hand.

I like people that scrape themselves up off the floor and come back swinging. We’ve been swinging ever since, more or less.

Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas, My Brother

Commenter “Deb from Madison” mentioned Christmas wreaths made from computer punch cards, and Christmas trees made from Reader’s Digests and gold spray paint, and I about wept. Talk about a shared experience. A Scandinavian was as rare as a sober Kennedy where I’m from, so they’ll be no Euchre. Italians play Whist, thank you. But it’s just the same, otherwise.

There’s a sort of self-examination rampant in modern life that is corroding shared experience. Nothing is done unless it’s filmed, dissected, and critiqued. We used to just do stuff, and not worry too much about the deeper meaning of it. The deeper meaning was reserved for the impetus of the holiday. Now they’d write ten thousand column inches, footnoted, about the deeper meaning of using computer punch cards to make a Christmas wreath.

Let me shorten it up for the poindexters: We were poor. Christmas was important. We celebrated it as best we could with the materials at hand. And Deb and I, and I’m sure many others, remember that fondly.

I miss my older brother. He lives in California, and likes it. I miss him especially at Christmas. My brother is a fair sum older than I, would come home from collegefor Christmas and sleep until noon every day, and make icosahedron ornaments out of my construction paper. We’d plead with him to take out his guitar, and marvel at the music being conjured out of the dead splits of mahogany and sitka spruce. There was no video cameras then for us, or YouTube, of course. He could probably cook it up fresh for you to this day, but the recipe and the chef is 2500 miles away from me today. I found this fellow on the Tube, and it’ll have to do:

That’s very European, that music. It says snowflakes and sleighs and so forth. Let’s go south for the finish, and let a culture whose simple piety and joyous attitude toward a holiday makes Santa come right out of the desert, too. My brother lives hard by that desert. Here’s hoping Santa comes out of it for you too, my brother.

Feliz Navidad to all, and to all a good night.

Hi Dee Hi Dee Hi Dee Ho Ho Ho

[Editor’s Note: This is a re-run from last year, with a new link to a new Christmas light picture site as the old one seems to be associated with an internet gambling site now. As if the Christmas lights weren’t tacky enough. Anyway, the new site seems to have the requisite holiday spirit. Also, it’s gratifying that last year’s reference to arguing about Christmas seems to be less apt this year. That usually means the side I liked surrendered, and there’s no use talking about it anymore. Whatever; Merry Christmas!}

{Author’s Note: There is no editor.}

I never hear the word “decry” for eleven months of the year, but I get it morning noon and night at Christmastime. Seems like everyone’s decrying some aspect of the Christmas thing, and if you look in more than one place, you’ll find people decrying the opposing angles of the same Christmas condition. Christmas is too religious for some. It’s too mercenary and secular two doors down. Me, I think Christmas is too tasteful.

Now, Christmas was a big deal when I was young and Johnson was president. We weren’t wealthy, and your birthday and Christmas were the only days you’d get any swag. We’d study the Sears catalog like we study Victoria’s Secret catalogs now, make our Christmas list, then we’d be schlepped all over creation — in a Rambler station wagon or a Dodge Dart with a steel dashboard or a Chevy Impala convertible with a hole in the roof — to our relatives’ houses to be spoiled a bit by their generosity. None of them were wealthy either, but they always seemed to have the time and money and affection to get even their most obscure nieces and nephews a little something. The younger you were, the better the present generally was, because after all, it’s easier to buy a present for a child, isn’t it?

What all those homes had in common when we visited was hospitality, and garish and hamfisted Christmas decoration. Jimmy Stewart was very much alive, but Martha Stewart hadn’t appeared on the scene yet, and it showed — metallic white fake Christmas trees with rotating muticolored spotlights aimed at them; big red, blue, and green bulbs strung along the outlines of the house; plastic Santas guarding plaster creches; spray-on frost riming the windows; cheap looking tinsel and home made tree ornaments that looked like you wore your mittens when you made them. It knew no race, or creed, or social station; it was all bad, and lovely.

And your Aunts would hug you, smelling of lilac perfume and the kitchen, and slip you quarters on the way out; your Uncles would tell stories and and roar the loudest at their own japes; and when you got older they’d crush your hand in a welcoming handshake to see if you still squealed.
The music was lively, and sometimes wistful, which was nice. Christmas in 1965 was only twenty years removed from WW2, and thirty from the depression, and most all my relatives were old enough to remember when Christmas wasn’t so jolly. And the perspective that the emergence from true want and danger lent to their mood was like the bubbles in champagne.

I can’t bring myself to decorate in the garish style of my youth. Jimmy Stewart’s passed away, and he’s on the flatscreen at Mr Potter’s now only, but Martha Stewart is in the here and now, out of jail and demanding once more that we straighten up and garland ourselves properly. My Aunts and Uncles have made their way to their reward, many of them, and the others are far away in distance, if not in our hearts.

But I have a weakness now that I indulge by visiting websites devoting to pointing a jaundiced finger at bad Christmas yard displays. I wonder: Am I the only one there, with a tear in his eye, remembering how genuine, and fun, and innocent these things were to the dearest people?

I cometh to bury Caeser, not to praise him.

Still, I’d like to visit one more time; put the kettle on.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

It’s possible for a Christmas wish to be something besides an X-box.

Most people have an intense longing for an intense longing. When the landscape doesn’t present an opportunity to desperately want something, we have a tendency to manufacture it. Anyone that has seen sacks of rice tumble off an aid truck in a place where famine rules recognizes the behavior of a crowd at a mall the day after Thanksgiving, in a frenzy trying to buy a Playstation 3. Recognize it, but not understand it, exactly.

I don’t want any “thing” for Christmas. I’m too old for that sort of thing. But Christmas gets me to thinking.

Judy Garland’s singing is lovely in the video. The song is worthy of a compelling performance. People who really knew what they were doing used to write, produce, and perform mass entertainment. And the themes were very adult. Christina Aguilera and her ilk, writhing about on the stage drooling melismas and flashing her naughty bits is really sort of infantile, when considered dispassionately. And while the opening up of all sorts of mass media to the forces of the democratic selection of entertainment is wonderful in many ways, the rise of the amateur has its problems. Shakespeare would not have blogged. Judy Garland wouldn’t have sung karaoke.

It is useful to reflect upon the wistful nature of the song and the images that accompany it. That tableau is being played out in many places in the United States right now, and Judy Garland, Ralph Blane, and Hugh Martin probably ain’t showing up to tell those home alone –some alone forever — that their intense longing is shared by many, if not all of their fellow men.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, now.