I get it now - gifts and grannies

Hello Everyone,

When I was a young(er) man, there were three kinds of hockey fans. By far the largest groups were the Wayne Gretzky fans (mostly anglos) and Mario Lemieux fans (mostly francos), since these were two of the best to ever pick up a twig. That left the much smaller group, the Steve Yzerman fans to be almost entirely made up of devastatingly handsome iconoclasts. I was of the third group.

Stevie Y was the connoisseur’s favourite. Not as flashy as the others, but a complete player. Hockey fandom was the water I swam in, and a not so little part of my identity was being an Yzerman fan. So you can perhaps imagine the mixture of emotions I felt when I learned that a family connection had not only met the great Red Wings captain, but worked with him as his equipment rep. But it didn't end there. Through this connection, my great-grandmother received a signed miniature hockey stick for her birthday one year. It would be like a priest finding out his second cousin is the Pope and gave your grandmother a piece of the True Cross. I didn't know about bank vaults back then, but if I had, I would have been sure that this is where they kept the stick.

On a trip to visit my great grandmother (I was roughly 9 years old), I heard talk of the stick and was hoping that I might get to look at this holy item, and if I behaved, maybe even touch it.

But that is not what happened.

At the end of the visit, my great-grandmother came into the living room with the stick in her hand, slapped the blade in her palm a few times, said something nice and handed it to me. To keep. Like, as my own.

I can’t remember the nice things that she said because my ears were ringing and my mind was fiercely trying to keep the lights on.

Who could give away such a prized possession? I was elated, but also worried. Did I guilt her, somehow, into giving it to me? What could have precipitated giving away something only a few notches down from the Stanley Cup itself. Surely this item belonged in a museum, or behind protective glass of some kind. The idea that some people might not quite place hockey at the centre of their existence had not yet occured to my pre-pubescent mind.

It has now, though. The best metaphor for parenting is gardening. You don’t make a plant grow, you provide the conditions for the seed to become a healthy and vibrant plant on its own. I think about that moment, when my great grandmother put the stick in my hand, especially around Christmas or the Munchkin’s birthday. My great-grandmother didn’t give me a lecture about being generous or kind or anything like that. She just handed over the stick because she knew how much it would mean to me, and trusted that I would learn the other stuff when it was time.

I get it now, in a way that I couldn’t then.

Thanks Granny.

Wes

P.S. Where is that stick now? Not in a safe or mounted on a wall, but in my living room, where’s it’s used as it was meant to be. As a child’s hockey stick.