It's l0 pm on a Sunday night, and a ten-year-old boy can't get to sleep. Instead he sits up in bed, with a small lamp on over his shoulder, and draws. His concentration is formidable; he barely even notices me studying him from across the room.
He has his knees drawn up, wrapped as he is in one of my oversized T-shirts (or what we call Night Shirts), this particular one is bright red and has a Detroit Red Wings insignia, signifying my family roots in Detroit and Canada, lands of the northern ice.
To grow up where I did, you had to learn to ice skate. During much of winter freeze, we could skate to school, to the store, to each other's houses. We also could transform the cornfields to hockey rinks, albeit with an unusual number of hazards in the form of dried, bent corn stalks pushing up here and there.
We'd strap on our skates over wool socks, long underwear, and jeans, shirts, sweatshirts, gloves, scarves and wool caps. Everyone had a hockey stick. As we divided up into teams, we'd pick as our identity one of the six professional teams:
Montreal Canadians
Toronto Maple Leafs
Chicago Blackhawks
Detroit Red Wings
New York Rangers
Boston Bruins
That's all there were. Hockey was a game strictly known in the north, in places cold enough for kids to grow up skating and pushing the puck along the ice ahead of them.
As a teenager, I rebounded from my earlier bout with rheumatic fever and became big, strong, fast, in love with the outdoors air. I could skate as fast as anyone but I couldn't stop very effectively, which led to a pretty out-of-control playing style.
Hockey is controlled insanity at best, with vicious checking and collisions and the ever-present danger you'll be knocked senseless by that hard rubber puck flying around at speeds that easily broke windows, bottles, and bones.
It helped to be fearless in the way testosterone-enriched young boys are. I don't remember ever getting badly injured, just bruised and cut up enough for the whole thing to have felt like "fun."
***
Last night's young artist was obsessing about a different kind of excitement -- the intrigue of "investigative reporters" and "FBI agents," he later told me. By the time he was done with his drawing, turned out the lamp and rolled over to sleep, he'd completed an evocative little scene, with details to tell his story.
I've reproduced it here; clicking on reveals an enlarged version where the details become clearer through a smoky haze, almost the a scene from an old black-and-white movie...
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