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.