Posted on May 18, 2013 under Storytelling with one comment

Admit it.  You like the Bee Gees.  Or, at least you did back in the 1970’s.  What was your favorite song?  Was it “Stayin’ Alive” or was it “Words”?  How about “Saturday Night Fever” or “I Started a Joke”?  One of my favorites was “Fanny Be Tender”.  At least that’s what it was up until today.  Let me explain.

I was in Halifax today to see my physiotherapist and also to check in on our new granddaughter, Leah Rose.

Gary is my healer and an appointment was arranged with him to try and alleviate the pain in my back and my neck.  He is an affable Newfoundlander.  He confessed that he was going to Fantasy Island for the weekend.  That would be Cape Breton for the uninformed.  Yes, the first long weekend is upon us and many people will be on the move, digging out the camping gear or heading to open up the cottage.  It is definitely a weekend for friends, family and food.

I expect that the grocery stores will sell many pounds, if not tons, of steak as people will gather around the barbeque for a feast, washed down with a glass or two of merlot.  My son-in-law taught me how to barbeque the correct way.  He is another Newfoundlander and they are culinary experts, having perfected other delicacies like cod tongues and jigs dinner.  One of the keys to a good steak is to properly tenderize it a few hours before cooking.  I have seen people go at raw beef with everything from a fork to a skewer, in order to pound the meat into submission.

I was pondering this as I lay on the examination table in Gary’s office.  Besides his physio skills, he has also mastered a technique to reduce pain by using acupuncture needles.  Except these needles are not your garden variety that scarcely pierce the skin.  No.  These are weapons of flesh destruction.  I have never had the nerve to actually look at them but I’m guessing they’re around three inches in length.  The fact that he needs to use his foot to push them in lends credence to my description.

Gary is inherently a pretty decent guy.  I know things are about to get worse when he tries to distract me with humour.  Sadists derive pleasure as a result of inflicting pain, degradation and humiliation on someone.  Now there’s a trifecta you don’t want to meet too often.  I am not suggesting for a moment that he is enjoying watching me writhe but it sure seems that way.  I swear at him.  He smiles and giggles.

He determines the exact location of the problem in the lower back and immediately starts jabbing needles into my butt.  Sort of like treating a toothache by cutting your toenails first.  But having been through this procedure before, I know what to expect.  I have a pretty good idea of what a steak feels like after being tenderized.

After the assault on my butt and lower back have ended, he moves up to my neck.  Several needles to the neck and, mercifully, my session of “healing” comes to an end.  Short term pain for long term gain.  While it sounds gruesome, it works.  He does marvellous work.

After visiting my newest sweetheart, Leah Rose, I’m back on the road home.  I start humming my favorite Bee Gees tune except I change the lyrics: “Gary, Be Tender with My Fanny”.

Posted on May 18, 2013 under Storytelling with one comment

I will have a story for you either later today or tomorrow. I spent some quality time with a physiotherapist yesterday to deal with some pain issues. It was hardly a laughing matter as you are about to discover but I had fun trying to write something funny as he stuck about two dozen long accupuncture needles into my butt, back and neck. Sounds like the perfect way to start off a long weekend!

I don’t know about you, but wearing winter gloves as opposed to golf gloves on the May long weekend seems absurd. They ( weather people ) are actually calling for snow in parts of the province this weekend. What is this global warming thing, anyway?

Thank you for the response to the rink story. I think everyone must have snuck into a hockey game at some point or other!

Wedding season is fast approaching and I have a story just about ready to go called “Last Waltz”. It’s actually a story about the first waltz at a wedding reception. Do you remember yours?

Posted on May 14, 2013 under Storytelling with 3 comments

Every small community in Canada at one time or another has had a rink.  Some of them survive to this day while others have fallen to the wrecking ball.  If you are from Antigonish, are a baby boomer and played hockey or liked to skate in your youth, you have at some point in your life enjoyed the charms of the old Memorial Rink on the campus of St. F. X University.  Our local rink was built after WW1 in 1921.  If you close your eyes, I’m sure you can see it clearly and possibly even smell it.  It was an architectural oddity yet it was the heartbeat of the campus and the community for a very long period of time.

I didn’t know who Ferlin Husky was until I attended my first skating party, one of many mating rituals for young people back then.  From the enchanting little room at the entrance to the rink, some poor person had to play the same 30 or so songs at every skating party.  After about the hundredth time that I heard “Wings of a Snow White Dove”, I was ready to hitchhike to Cantwell, Missouri and strangle Ferlin.

Back then, hockey was not the 24/7 obsession that it is today and most minor hockey was conducted on the weekends.  The youngest played the earliest on any given Saturday morning.  If you lived in town, you would gear up at home and walk to the rink.  Sometimes this involved walking with your skates on as nobody tied skate laces quite like Mom.  There were no such things as skate guards back then.  It’s not surprising that none of the MacDonald boys made it to the NHL.

If you arrived before Frank did, and it was bitterly cold, you simply walked next door to the boiler room and hung out there.  It wasn’t quite Hades but gave some indication of hell fire.  It had its own unique smell on the inside and on many days you could taste the toxic mix of ammonia and sulphur as you walked through campus.  And of course, when they burned coal, the evidence could be found on sheets hung out on the clothesline.

Most people use two by fours to build things.  Frank used them as ice dividers.  Long before a pampered generation had access to full size rinks using the entire ice surface, the ice surface at the Memorial was a maze.  It was an amazing stroke of genius on Frank’s part.  How could he possibly teach 100 kids at the same time?  He divided the ice into sections using lumber.  At any point in time, four games could be happening simultaneously with Frank masterminding the entire process.  Later in the morning as the bigger kids showed up, boards were removed progressively and only the oldest got to use the entire surface.  If you wonder why so many of the old timers can stick handle so well, it probably came from learning how to handle the puck in very tight quarters.

Frank was also building other things with those two by fours: character.

There were dressing rooms that smelled like several dozen hockey bags, filled with unwashed equipment, which was exactly the case.  Some guys never washed their stuff.  No wonder no one wanted to go into the corners with them.  There were actually several dressing rooms and some were accessed by a tunnel which connected the rink to the adjacent gymnasium … another interesting architectural anomaly.  The public washrooms were also found through this tunnel so between periods of big hockey games, you had players and fans marching side by side down this semi darkened dreary hallway.  Scary stuff. The only thing scarier was the washrooms themselves.  Let’s just not go there.

Of course, the university played their games there as did the high school team, the senior Bulldogs, minor hockey and the County League.  I think I went to one County League game where hockey broke out after several brawls … and that was just among the spectators.  The smell of sweat was intermingled with the smell of liquor at many a hockey game.

And there were legendary games, none more so when St .F. X played the Toronto Marlies back in the mid ‘60’s.  The Marlies were the farm team for the Toronto Maple Leafs and they were a power house filled with future NHLers.  St .F. X. beat them with some of the greatest hockey ever witnessed in the venerable old shrine.  I can still see Chi Chi firing a blazing wrist shot.  It was one of the few sporting events I ever attended with my father and one that will be treasured forever.

You may remember that there wasn’t a concession stand in the rink.  When the horn sounded to end a period there would be a mad stampede to one of two local food joints abutting the campus: the Gag and the Wagon Wheel.  These two institutions are stories unto themselves.

The atmosphere at playoff games was electric.  The bleachers were as close to the action as physically possible. There was no Plexiglas around the sides and just an excuse for a wire fence at either end behind the net.  You could literally touch the players and there were times that bodies flew into the stands.  And of course, smoking was in vogue those days so it was not uncommon when a game went into overtime to see a blue haze hover over the ice surface.  Classic stuff, for sure.

And how about the big old clock at the South end with the large hands ticking off the minutes and seconds.

There was no Zamboni back in those days.  There was an old contraption that was filled with boiling water and dragged around the surface by two of the rink’s custodians.  Of course, this was after the ice had been scraped clean with hand operated snow plow shovels.  I kept myself in booze money during university by being a rink rat.  Was there any finer occupation?  Anything for a buck and a chance to be spotted by a young female.  This was yet another desperate attempt by a nerdy teenager to be noticed by the fairer sex.

The snow was collected and pushed through a door in the rink boards and then outside through a snow door.  Many an enterprising youth, short on cash, found his way into hockey games between periods through those venerable snow doors.

And for sheer pleasure, there was always the possibility of a game of wildcat hockey.  You showed up when you knew the ice wasn’t being rented, or merely snuck in through an unlocked door while the staff was having an extra-long lunch break.  Anyone who showed up played.  Even a few brave priests, who taught at the University, laced them up from time to time.  You just threw all the sticks in the middle and when there were two piles of sticks sorted, the teams were determined.  There’s nothing much better than just playing for the sheer joy of the game.

But alas, all good things must pass and eventually the vagaries of time took their toll and the rink was torn down and replaced by a science building.  I am sure that if you go there today and listen intently; perhaps you will hear the ghosts of the old Memorial Arena.  And if you look up in the North East corner, you just might catch a glimpse of George and Louie.