I DON’T HAVE ANY copies of the Saturday Star Weekly, but for years it was the staple of homey Canadian living, with articles on everything from cooking to beaver dams.
It had an Ottawa or Toronto feel. That being said, it rested in various places in many shacks and shanties, and many houses too, across the country. I’ve seen it used to wrap salmon that my uncle brought down to us in the dark night. I’ve seen it in outhouses, and on the back shelf in garages. It was used to insulate porches, behind drywall, and it fluttered in the sleepy breezes on our car seats in July. It placed itself usually within the safe pedestrian bounds of common opinion, and rested upon its laurels as being the magazine that informed us in a never too dangerous way, about ourselves.

It showed the fashions. Had the glossy pictures. Michael was subcontracted to deliver the Star Weekly on Saturday. He
would pick the paper up from Darren in the morning and do the back road, Skytown and along the tracks.
This would earn him, maybe 50 cents, maybe a dollar. Darren would do King George Highway, down to Dunn’s barber shop. Michael had the longer route.

There was a reason for this subcontract on Saturday. Darren did not consider himself welcome anywhere near Skytown — not since the Christmas of 1960. That was when he gave one of the Griffin kids a black eye in a fight — by hitting him in the face with a rock in his hand. I think Michael did the route every Saturday for about eight weeks. Paper boys have a large turnover. Who can blame them? Everything Michael did back then to earn money was, in actual fact, child labour.
To have to share two cents on a paper, on a freezing cold Saturday in February was pretty much like delivering the mail for free. To do it with the sense of gratitude Michael had, or a sense of wonder that Tobias had, that his big brother had a job, seems almost farcical now. But other jobs were just as stingy. The money kids earned was almost always negligible back then.

Once down past the creamery lane he was in unfamiliar territory — in foreign land. The farther down the road he went, the farther he would have to go to come back.
There was also the idea implicit in all of this of the attitude of the Skytowners. Friendly could become unfriendly real quick. The neighbourhood rink you passed on your way down could turn into a cauldron of recruits on your way up. Ganging up on someone was always considered cowardly. Yet there was a certain reasoning, where the idea of ganging up on a person was not considered low or mean-spirited. If you were in someone else’s neighbourhood, if injury or insult was remembered, you were fair game.

Of course most of the time under those low winter skies this was benign, and no one bothered you. But there were fierce flare-ups into wars where twenty kids charged twenty kids with hockey sticks. Or when games on the neighbourhood rinks ended in a kind of pitched battle.

This particular incident didn’t start on a March Saturday in 1961 — it started near Christmas of 1960. Everyone was playing hockey, and we had all wandered down to Griffin’s rink to play. The Griffin boys began to tease the much-tormented Garth, and steal his rubber boot. This happened because of Garth’s belief in Santa Claus. Nor did he know what to do except to break down crying. And this made everyone on the Griffin side of the rink howl and laugh.

Lorrie Griffin grabbed the boot, put it on his stick and began to run about the rink with it. It was a great victory for the Griffins.

I think that the worst thing Lorrie did that afternoon was not to steal the boot or refuse to give the boot back while Garth was chasing him about, slipping on his brown, well-tied, immaculately groomed, neat and clean shoe, but that he stood in the centre of the rink and began to wiggle. No one can stand a victorious wiggler.
Garth was not the most popular boy in our group — but he did have the right to freedom of belief in Santa. I don’t think Darren said, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Or express it in quite those terms. I think he said, “Okay then I’ll get a rock.”

People sometimes forget that “defending to the death” might mean putting someone else to death. Darren rushed over, hit the wiggler in the eye with his fist. All of this lasted about a minute. Garth grabbed his boot, and we all trudged over the snowbank and down the path, with chunks of ice and stones flailing about us.

They knew Michael was trudging his way into their territory each Saturday. But they needed some kind of a plan. A kind of attack from the rear. A kind of worry on Michael’s part. A kind of — Tobias. They needed a Tobias. The weak link. The Achilles heel of Michael.

But they didn’t know this is what they needed until they saw Tobiasdawdling behind Michael one Saturday. He kept getting farther behind,
as Michael rushed door to door to get the paper delivered. Finally Tobias
had fallen back and was out of sight.
Michael went back to get him. He was leaning by a pole, looking up
and down the street. “You wait here — right by this pole — and don’t
move — I’ll be back for you,” Michael said.
Michael turned, and then turning back gave Tobias a five-cent piece.
“This is for yer help.

THE TRAIL SMOKE EATERS were mentioned in the House of Commons. In those days Ottawa seemed as far away from me as Prague.
Hockey was mentioned in the House of Commons again in ’72. It was mentioned in 1987 when our World Juniors were involved in the fight with the Russians.

However the most famous occasion it was mentioned in our House of Commons — in recent times — was when Gretzky was going to L.A. That Mr. Gretzky’s going to L.A. was mentioned in the House of Commons was picked up by American television. It was also big news in the Soviet Union. The idea that Canadians were concerned that a great Canadian hockey player was going to play in the States was newsworthy.

“Why should he go there if he is a Canadian?” one Russian hockey fan asked on a CBC news program.

Such interest was a very strange thing to me. It was as if we suddenly decided to stop a grain of sand in an hourglass. It was a great grain to try to stop — perhaps the greatest. But my God — Orr, Hull, Howe, Savard, Izerman, Coffey, Messier — one can conceivably go on for hours.

To mention Gretzky was, in fact, an insult to Canadians. Nothing more. For if no one thought about the great Bobby Orr going to Boston, no one thought of Canadian hockey as heritage we were content to piss away.

Christ, who was the greater player — Orr or Gretzky? But it also allowed a misconception to be reinforced — that we, in Canada, were actually concerned about our hockey players, and that Gretzky was somehow the exception rather than the rule. That our players played for Edmonton — and their players played for L.A.

Perhaps it should have been mentioned in the House of Commons, but it goes to show that sometimes in Canada, even when you win, you are bound to lose.

It was in mid-March of 1961 when Stafford gave up on Lloyd Percival. I remember passing him one night as he stood in a phone booth, talking,with his big, brown earmuffs sideways on his head. He turned and looked my way briefly and turned back. The sky was cold, the long King George Highway stretched forever. I was walking down to the store.

I had already been to the curling club four or five times and I had asked him to come with me. The curling club ice was pebbled; the stones looked too huge to lift. And I really thought I was not going to be able to curl either — that I was doomed. I couldn’t follow the scoreboard.

Besides this, it was a game that people older than my father played. “Yes, yes — I remember your grandmother playing here a few years ago,” a man said to me.

I learned later on that, as with hockey, curling was our game, and we hated when we were beaten at it. I learned also that the same things about hockey applied to curling.

1. That it was part of our national consciousness and we couldn’t separate ourselves from it.
2. The Europeans and now and again the Americans, would become much better.
3. That we were abundantly generous with our time and our coaches and our clinics, to help other nations.
4. As long as we were the very best, we would never have it as an Olympic game. Only when the Europeans felt that they could match us in prestige would they allow us, and therefore themselves, this.
5. Once again, as in Bunny Ahearne’s day, countries such as Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, would get a vote on Canadian sport.

Curling was so closely linked to hockey in the winter in small towns that they became almost interchangeable. In our town, as in most, the rinks are next door to one another. But at this point in life Stafford did not think much about curling.

Often at nine at night his father would be driving about the neighbourhood looking for him. He began to hang about with a guynamed Jimmy J. Jimmy J. was nineteen then. I think he still hangs about with boys and girls about puberty age.

Jimmy J. was married at this time. He had a step-son of seven or eight who he used to hang about with. His wife was a hair dresser. At this point in his life he drove a milk truck. He always had a dozen kids of puberty age or younger in his milk truck driving them somewhere. His marriage did not last that long — about a year.

He was very tall and thin, with cowboy boots, and a sandy coloured brushcut. Anything kids were interested in, he would get — he had his own go-cart.

I remember Stafford and Jimmy J. sitting in the milk truck. Jimmy J. had a cigarette behind each ear and one in his mouth. He had a rabbit paw on his keys. Stafford had a cigarette in his mouth too.

I saw them in at White’s Pharmacy as I walked home. “Trail won,” I said to Stafford, “Trail won — we won, we won — TRAIL — we won.” Stafford looked at me as if he were bored, blinked and said nothing.

He held a cigarette in his left hand, down near the stickshift so I wouldn’t see it. I was angered by this. Jimmy J. laughed and Stafford too, half-heartedly. But the idea why they were laughing only became evident when I got home and looked into the mirror. There was my mouth, all wobbly and twisted sideways. I hated the dentist at that moment, even though I had won 50 cents.

It was the only time Stafford ever laughed at me. Yet for a time everything was Jimmy J. The Foley kids had a huge fort built near their rink — with windows and small tunnels leading under the snow towards the house. One night as I walked by I saw Jimmy J.’s head poking out a window.

“Go way, go way,” he said to me, and he ducked his head back in, and then out another window, and laughed.

I REMEMBER HOW S TAFFORD stuck to those tiny yellow handbooks written by Lloyd Percival. He tried to exercise everyday in the open air — which meant he left his bedroom window open and froze the upstairs out. Because this is what Lloyd told him to do.

There was a greyness to the snow, the earth itself. All winter long, lights from across our windswept river flicked out like beacons on faraway islands. For months there seemed to be nothing but small paths along the sidewalks, and snowbanks as high or higher than our houses. And Stafford exercised in his small sleeveless T-shirt, staring into the dark. Lloyd had told him to do it. His stretches and his toe touching and his limbering up for the big game that never came.

He kept a progress chart on his wall, and did practice shooting outside at a tin can. Night after night just after supper he would go outside with his tin can and his hockey stick, and try to flick a puck and hit it, like the man in the movie Liberty Valance, a string of lights over his head, and half the lights burnt out. Stafford Foley’s rink had disappeared by this time and was a trough of water and ruts covered with new, white snow.

He tried to jump over a broom handle. He practised stopping and starting quickly, but only in his rubber boots, and of course he tried to stickhandle and deek a board. From my window I would often see him running about this board, like a squirrel in a cage. I never quite knew what it was he was doing.

I suppose he was a Lloyd Percival addict. He was the first person I remember who insisted his mother get wholewheat bread. His father would take a bite of it, spit it back on his plate and say, “What in Christ is this?”

He ate fruit and vegetables, and walked about with a chunk of cheese in his pocket. He almost never ate the cheese — he just had it in his pocket. He started a regimen of weightlifting. I have often considered the wounded as being the ones obligated to do this. By the end of March he was lifting 30 to 40 pounds.

At school he stayed away from me. During the whole time the Trail Smoke Eaters were over in Europe he never spoke about hockey to me. I think half of the reason Stafford stayed away from me is because I was so fanatical about Trail. I was a psychological menace to everyone in Canada when Canada was playing international hockey.

All during this time, my relatives in Boston made no calls, and we heard nothing from them. We were supposed to go down to Boston at the end of March — of course I was going as a tagalong; and I knew that if Trail did not win the World Championship, I would have nothing to say. In fact, I would want to say nothing. I wouldn’t even want to go.

The Colonel told me that no one had given Trail much of a chance but that he thought they could win, and then he put, “At least the silver.” Silver was no good, and never has been any good for Canada — there is not a team who ever played for Canada who has won a silver and actually wanted it. This is one thing about hockey. No Canadian ever felt great about a silver medal. It shows you where the game stands in our psyche.

When Trail was overseas, I began to get the first solid impressions of our opposition. I still thought of them on outside arenas far away, but I was essentially beginning to differentiate one team from the other. To know them as chunks of their country’s personalities. For instance, no matter how much I admired Mats Naslun later on, I disrespected the Swedes then, and now, and forever. I felt they were bogus world champions whenever they claimed to be. I have always felt that at our best the Swedes would never be a match for us.

I feared, hated, respected and admired the Russians. I didn’t feel it then, but over the years I felt that they were the one
other country which could make a legitimate claim to the World Championship. That is often why, when in those contests in which some other country wins the World Championship or the Gold medal, it is more important to us how we fared against the Russians. I know the Russians feel that way about us.

“There is one team Canada has always had to watch — the back-door team — the Czechs,” the Colonel told me in early March of 1961.
The Czechs I also knew. I liked them more than either the Swedes or the Russians. I didn’t know them well, but I assumed at times that they liked us. The Swedes would never give us a wink. Definitely not the Russians, the Czechs might. At least I thought this way for a while. Canada. Well God knows what I thought. Canada was always the team to beat at these affairs even when they weren’t seeded number one. That is, every other team got up to play Canada.

Stafford decided that I was no longer his friend. He would come over to my side of the street and call for Garth instead of me. He would often leave when I showed up to play on Michael’s rink.

I was no longer his friend because I had gotten an assist. I finally brought this up to him. “Oh ho ho ho — you think that’s what it is,” he said. But he didn’t elaborate. He was betting money on Detroit. Detroit was this and Detroit was that, and there was nothing anyone could say. He was a Lloyd Percival, Detroit-loving fool. I knew Detroit would make the playoffs,
but I was hoping for Montreal — who actually had the most points that year.

T HE TEAM M ICHAEL SHOULD have been on was doing well. They beat Bathurst 3–2, which was never supposed to happen. The little peewee they had brought up, Tony LeBlanc, who had scored against Boston, was scoring for them. He had scored on a breakaway against Bathurst with a minute and ten seconds left. He was no bigger than Stafford. Yet he could move about you as if you were standing cold; he slipped through checks all year long, and he came out of nowhere from behind the net, could always tuck the puck behind the goal tender, and then raise his stick with one hand as he glided into an embrace, his big Bantam A shirt down to his knees.

A dozen times in a game you thought he would be creamed, only to watch him slip through, and head towards the net. And the older boys seemed to be like big brothers to him.

I mentioned that they had brought Darren up from the Peewees as well and had put him on the wing. The team had jelled since its loss to Boston, and was waiting to go back to Boston in the spring to exact a terrible revenge. Even Phillip Luff knew enough to pass the puck so others could score.

The rink was becoming filled again for the Bantam As. Suddenly there was the idea that the town had a team again — kids who were giving everything they had, wearing ancient hockey sweaters and mismatched socks.

In the house league that Stafford and I still played in, we too had spectators — small children who had figure skating before us, the few rink rats who were obligated to be there, the woman who ran the concession stand, and a few mothers and fathers. Also the coach, who was the coach of the Bantam All-Stars also, and who Stafford was a terrible suck-up to. I suppose he knew I knew, and only wanted me to realize that he couldn’t help it.

Now and then, playing his heart out he would be castigated by the mother of one of the other players for allowing the team to fall behind.“Are you blind?” Sharon would yell at him. Stafford would wipe his eyes, would look over, smile and keep on going.

“Ah get off the ice and go sit down — who are you — the coach’s pet hang around the coach — don’t worry now boys you can just waa Ik in and score — walllk in and sc-OORE. Idiot arse is on the ice again. Ole Idiot Arse Piss the Bed is on the ice.”

And so it spread, and Stafford was known, secretly as Piss the Bed and Idiot Arse. If you went over and told people he was a sleepwalking, fall- down diabetic with a maniacal desire to participate in events normal children around the country did, it might have made a difference. But he did not do this. Nor would he want anyone else to.

Of all the people who ever yelled and screamed at the coach or children, or bullied, I found mothers to be by far the worst. The most vicious. Every moment on the ice must have been agony for some children. And Stafford was one of those children. Those who made it with ease, like his brothers, or those who refused to let it destroy them like Michael would not have much idea what Stafford went through.

odding now and again to the other players as they skated by. Once or twice when Stafford touched the puck, usually having it hit his stick he would yell out to the coach, his face gone mad with glee, “I touched the puck — I touched it.” “Ya, good — great,” the coach would say. “Keep up the good work.” Worse, was when Stafford’s sisters would arrive and yell out to us,
“There’s Rocket and Pocket — there’s Rocket and Pocket.” And we would skate a few blades, like grilse moving out of their position, nodding toward the bleachers, then try to skate backwards to our lay again.

But there were a few things I learned from those days. One was the viciousness certain adults have toward those who do not measure up. You are most often ridiculed by lesser men. We played from eight o’clock until about ten minutes to nine on
Saturday morning; then the Bantams would take over and then the Juveniles. The later in the day it was, the older the teams got, the more serious the players looked, until just before three o’clock you had players skating about with five o’clock shadows.

One morning we were playing the first place house-league team — theBruins. Stafford and I were at our blueline, watching the play develop up at the other end of the rink. It looked like we were going to score, but we didn’t. The puck tricked out and one of the Bruins grabbed it. Emmett, who looked like a small pitbull. Away he came towards us. And we stood there watching him. Quite politely we felt he would just wisshh by us. We would nod to him like we usually did. And that would be it. This had nothing to do with our not wanting to stop him. We wanted to stop him — we just weren’t sure how.

But this morning as he came down the ice towards us, he noticed me as I stood on the blueline, and putting his head down made a quick turn to his left — right in Stafford’s direction. “Get out of the way,” I yelled at Stafford. “Get out of the way.”
Emmett did not see Stafford of course. Most people did not see Stafford. Nor did Stafford move. Perhaps he did not have time. Perhaps he just said the hell with it. Everyone on both benches was yelling at him to get out of the way. Our coach, their coach. Sharon. But Stafford was frozen. At the very last second Emmett looked up. I saw Stafford close his eyes.

I WOULD LIKE TO MENTION THIS: I heard a song once by an old black man, from the south. And I said to myself: that does sound familiar — those guitar riffs, that old refrain; ah, yes — I remembered it was sung by a white rockabilly boy that winter of 1961 It was not made famous by this old blues man — this sad old blues singer from Mississippi; it was made famous by the be bop a loo bop
rockabilly boy with the white complexion, who could introduce the song to mainstream America — package it in a comfortable way to the girls who would not swing their dresses so high, wiggle too, too much.
 
It was a great song. At first, I liked the rockabilly version. The old man’s version seemed so strange — so foreign to me, that I did not accept it.

The record company wanted the old blues song that came from blood and sweat in that Mississippi delta. They wanted the guitar riffs, the lyrics. But they wanted it not so troubling, not so rough. They wanted to hide it away, and tuck it in. And they didn’t want the black voice husking out into the microphone.

But yes, they could profit from it. They wanted the song. They did not feel they had to tell you where this song came from. They did not feel a need to tell you that it came out of a person’s love of country and gift of life and tragedy when both have been taken away. They didn’t want those young college girls and boys who so desperately needed a song such as this — to know quite what it all was about.

And those record moguls knew that they didn’t need people to know the song’s history in order to sell the song. Nor did they consider that if people did not know the song’s history they might never know the song well.
 
But, as I say, I listened to it. I listened to the rockabilly version of this song in 1961 when I was a child playing hockey in the street. It was the rockabilly version under the cold sky that everyone tapped their toes to. It was the version that everyone heard which to them represented all the authenticity and spontaneity they believed the song had to offer.

Years later I heard the black man from the delta singing, in his gravelly voice this same song, in a house on a dark and solitary back street in Saint John, NB.
The rockabilly version is still out there. But now, nothing about it is so remarkable. It is a version with a mask, a front. It is still in its own way something you might dance to, buy, or send as a gift, as memorabilia of that long ago lost age. But the song, written and sung by the black man from the delta, goes beyond all of this. It is now, just as it was then. It has not lost itself in
nostalgia. It has not changed. It is not dated, because it comes as it was written, in sacrifice and courage and love.

IT WAS, THAT DAY IN 1989, when I went back to visit the town and met Paul, as if we were finally beginning to recognize what and who we were. It was deep winter — one of those winter days when you either go to work or start to drink wine at seven in the morning. We were walking along the highway on our way to visit Stafford Foley.

I could see how Stafford, back in 1961, would think his snake was real. He would think it was real because he wanted it to be real. He didn’t want to sleepwalk — walking down the street in his slippers. He didn’t want to have insulin attacks, where he would become as strong as the Amazing Hulk, and five or six of us would have to hold him down and feed him a sugar cube. He didn’t want to be tiny and blind. He wanted to have his own snake. He wanted to play hockey.

And if it wasn’t going to happen he would become a pathological delusionist. He would tell people Gordie Howe phoned him or he was over talking to the coach — who wanted him to become a scout for the team. Stafford had all kinds of plans such as this, back in 1961, and he was no more deluded than most of us. Not only did my father play Beach Blanket Bingo in October, where we would stand about in earmuffs watching our breath — and of course Annette — but, when I was not much older than this, we would have beach parties in January after a hockey game.

Yes we were all essentially madly self-deluded.

“But that is the fabric of our entire lives,” Paul said. “Self-delusions, overcome by self-mockery.” “And others’ mockery of us overcome by self-delusion.” Like Stafford and Michael. Like Phillip Luff’s father who wanted Phillip so badly to become a great hockey player that even when Phillip was in his 30s he couldn’t put away his skates. Even though his body was broken up and hurt, tormented by injury, he did not, for his father’s sake give up the fantastic dream. Even though his father by then wanted him to, Phillip could not.

“Still delusion or no, there will always be great moments,” Paul said, “great moments for us in hockey.” Hockey and other things as well. Mr. Foley played hockey in Europe on the army team from the North Shore. They played exhibition games in Scotland and England.
 
He was a great winger. Yet the greatest moment of Mr. Foley’s life came on D-Day. On D-Day Mr. Foley was doing the one thing that he didn’t quite expect to be doing. When the North Shore Regiment reached the wall, and skirted the first town, Mr. Foley had the opportunity to help deliver a baby girl, wrap it in swaddling clothes and keep on fighting.
 
Paul and Stafford knew this. And Mr. and Mrs. Foley could never ever turn anyone away from their door. Any child, any orphan was theirs. So, for that hockey year of 1961, was little Tobias.

I was once reprimanded by one of our new generation for thinking too much of children as orphans, or underprivileged little humans. Still and all, I knew my share of them. And I suppose as Mr. Foley thought, if you know one, you know them all. That is, orphans are like murderers. Once you know one, you can clue in to certain aspects of all of the others. Murderers almost always smile as if you’re the one they wouldn’t kill, and orphans almost always smile as if you’re the one they belong to. Both of them, like Canadians, can be self-deluded about their essential makeup.

Tobias used to attend all the birthday parties at the Foleys’ and leave certain articles of clothing there, so he could come back at a later date to retrieve them. But at other birthday parties he was left out. Shamefully I don’t remember him being invited to mine.
 
I remember a richer kid — one of the Griffin kids, showing Tobias and Michael his new goalie pads and skates and saying with smug certainty (as if he was repeating what his father had told him), “Kids like that always like to be shown what they are missing.”
 
Tobias did like to see what other children had. And Stafford on more than one occasion complained to us that Tobias was in his bed upstairs sleeping. The first time I heard him complain I was at the door to get a glass of water after a game of road hockey.