When you have a stick you can work on hockey skills off the ice with a ball instead of a puck. I had a stick and a practice ball, but I also have a cat who would foil my attempts to stickhandle across my house’s hardwood floors. Poor Buster took a stick to his face for his efforts, and I ended up in the emotional penalty box. No Norris Trophy for Buster and lots of questions for me. I needed to take my stick to an ice rink to practice. But, to meet rink requirements, I would need something I dreaded: gear.
Lots of people like gadgets and equipment and fiddling with said and arguing about which of this or that is the right one, the best one, the cool one. I am not one of those people. Until very recently, my only approach to computers, cars, stereos, guitars, amps, guns, tools, and so forth was to ask a self-appointed expert that I knew to tell me what I should buy given my various idiosyncratic requirements and then I would go get it. “My guitar needs to sound like a Les Paul but weigh less than an SG.” Lo and behold one of my gearhead buddies knew exactly what to suggest.
I have done this forever for two reasons: It usually works extremely well and quickly, and more important, I hate fiddling with things that don’t work immediately. I don’t have a tinkerer’s temper. I angrily toss first and ask questions about the wreckage later. I am my father’s daughter in this regard; as age has mellowed me somewhat, I have gone from the one who could not work with him on projects to the only one who can. Our results in this new partnership have been good, even if the outdoor peacock house we built ultimately went up and then down in flames. Still not sure how that exactly happened, but all critters, humans, and other structures were spared because of mom’s quick thinking.
Like my father—and I am sure many others—I want to push play and have something work. I don’t need, want, or tolerate long conversations with new televisions. (It goes without saying that I am not an early adopter of anything except Fluevogs.) Although not likely to ever be an engineer, I did find hockey at a time when I had learned the value of process. Many years spent learning and teaching pilates had shown me the merit of getting lost in pursuits I could not control or fully understand, regardless of the outcome. For the first time, I was okay with working on and learning skills I might never master. Even so, my overall troubleshooting threshold is not high, although hammers and electronics fly less frequently.
So, it was endlessly amusing and confusing that I had fallen in love with a sport that required lots of fussing around with foreign objects. The skates and stick were bad enough, but I was getting the hang of their upkeep: the skate blade sharpening, the wax laces that initially required a pull to tighten, the continuing questions about my stick’s weight. I was concerned about the stick’s peeling tape, though. What was I supposed to do about that? I was ignoring it for the moment, unless given a good reason otherwise.
And, it got even more confusing on my first trip to the hockey store. I was dizzy. So many gloves. So many sticks. So many pads. A helmet that needed endless adjustments by an extremely helpful staff. I wanted to bolt when they had to replace the cage with a smaller one. More adjustments, screws, tinkering. Would this work? I had no idea. I bought kid-sized gloves. Did that make sense?
Excited but exhausted, I left with my initial loot and immediately emailed an expert. No way I could sort this out on my own, and I didn’t have to because the first woman I had ever seen play also was extremely willing to help me conquer the gear fear. I just had to ask. It was becoming a trend, this asking and receiving, this learning to wonder and not immediately press play, a trusting that whatever I needed would eventually find its way to me when it was time for the next question.