Last updated on October 22, 2011
I know it’s a little bit late for National Coming Out Day, but I have a coming out of my own to make.
I am Canadian, and I don’t like hockey.
I don’t dislike the sport. It just leaves me completely indifferent. In elementary school, I would remain silent while my friends would discuss the previous night’s game during our morning walk to school. In secondary school, the annual hockey module in our PE classes was always the least interesting to me. And since I moved to the US ten years ago, I must have left many a would-be acquaintance scrambling for new topics after I replied in the negative to their “You’re Canadian? You must like hockey!” or “You’re from Montreal? Patrick Roy, man…”
All of which really means that this article from by Stephen Marche in The Walrus — the closest thing to The New Yorker in my home and native land — deserves all the accolades it can get. Indeed, although I have no interest in its subject matter, I read it with considerable interest from beginning to end:
In Canada, even death waits on hockey. During the gold medal game at the Vancouver Olympics, my sister-in-law was the duty nurse at a Toronto palliative care hospice. In the middle of the celebrations for Sidney Crosby’s winning goal, a woman who had years before disappeared into a stupor of dementia re-emerged momentarily, suddenly alert and smiling. She died later that night. My sister-in-law tells me that such moments of resurgent consciousness, brief flares before darkness, are not uncommon in the hospice. What thoughts and memories ran through the woman’s disintegrating neurons? Did she see, one last time, the steamy breath in the air above frozen ponds, the shouting of bruised boys in celebration?
Individual moments as intimate as that dying woman’s compose the mass ceremony we call hockey, the rabid fandom, the patriotic excuse for shutting down a city. A reported 16.6 million Canadians watched the gold medal game, making it the most viewed broadcast in the country’s history. Over 80 percent of Canadians watched some part. A graph released by the Edmonton water utility,EPCOR, showed that usage virtually ceased during the three periods of play, then spiked during the intermissions. If death waits on hockey in Canada, then so will other bodily functions.
This is a fine example of what William Zinsser means when he explains how a good writer can make any topic interesting.
The Meaning of Hockey
Last updated on October 22, 2011
I know it’s a little bit late for National Coming Out Day, but I have a coming out of my own to make.
I am Canadian, and I don’t like hockey.
I don’t dislike the sport. It just leaves me completely indifferent. In elementary school, I would remain silent while my friends would discuss the previous night’s game during our morning walk to school. In secondary school, the annual hockey module in our PE classes was always the least interesting to me. And since I moved to the US ten years ago, I must have left many a would-be acquaintance scrambling for new topics after I replied in the negative to their “You’re Canadian? You must like hockey!” or “You’re from Montreal? Patrick Roy, man…”
All of which really means that this article from by Stephen Marche in The Walrus — the closest thing to The New Yorker in my home and native land — deserves all the accolades it can get. Indeed, although I have no interest in its subject matter, I read it with considerable interest from beginning to end:
In Canada, even death waits on hockey. During the gold medal game at the Vancouver Olympics, my sister-in-law was the duty nurse at a Toronto palliative care hospice. In the middle of the celebrations for Sidney Crosby’s winning goal, a woman who had years before disappeared into a stupor of dementia re-emerged momentarily, suddenly alert and smiling. She died later that night. My sister-in-law tells me that such moments of resurgent consciousness, brief flares before darkness, are not uncommon in the hospice. What thoughts and memories ran through the woman’s disintegrating neurons? Did she see, one last time, the steamy breath in the air above frozen ponds, the shouting of bruised boys in celebration?
Individual moments as intimate as that dying woman’s compose the mass ceremony we call hockey, the rabid fandom, the patriotic excuse for shutting down a city. A reported 16.6 million Canadians watched the gold medal game, making it the most viewed broadcast in the country’s history. Over 80 percent of Canadians watched some part. A graph released by the Edmonton water utility,EPCOR, showed that usage virtually ceased during the three periods of play, then spiked during the intermissions. If death waits on hockey in Canada, then so will other bodily functions.
This is a fine example of what William Zinsser means when he explains how a good writer can make any topic interesting.
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Published in Commentary, Culture and Miscellaneous