Two regular team practices, one practice with the team he’s been called-up to practice with and tryout for, two regular season games, an afternoon at the local shooting pad, and a zillion hours of roller-hockey last week; the MSN exchange from the relative buffered safety of his room – read as disaster zone – this past Sunday went something like this:
Austin: Hey Dad… you know how Ryan and Tyler have pools in their backyards?
Dan: Uh yeah; NO we’re not getting a pool.
Austin: No, no, “we” don’t want a pool!
Dan: Who’s “we?”
Austin: ummm, well, like me Ryan, Riley, Braden, Nick,…etc.
Dan: Oh okay, that’s good. I’m glad to hear you and your friends aren’t requiring that we spend $40K on a pool and landscaping.
Austin: Yeah, but how much does a skating rink cost?
Dan: What???
Austin: Well, like, you-know, I was looking at that long-term weather icon thingy you put on my computer – thank you very much by the way – and well, the daytime highs are not expected to be much greater than -4 and nighttime lows by Thursday will be near -19, so “we” were thinking of … of a … well, like you know, a skating rink?
Dan: Oh Lord, here it comes … you mean my otherwise perfectly manicured backyard and summer-time golf green that I spend countless hours cutting with scissors, weeding by hand, not to mention single-handedly keeping the Miracle Grow brand afloat, is potentially about to be raped and pillaged with winter-kill? Not to mention hockey pucks with the well-aimed intention of pinging off pop-cans dangling from the upper most corners will instead shear through our barely a year old 6′ foot cedar saplings before becoming impaled in the neighbours wooden fence – to be renamed “the boards” – or worse, pucks smashing through our walk-out and into the big screen HDTV? Plus you’ll have every one of your friends over (rivaling the size of any two Oakville hockey teams) with floodlights on until midnight, yelling and screaming, and, when “I” have to get up at 5 am to flood, while you continue to snooze, I’ll first have to wade my way through a liter of drunken pop-cans, empty bags of chips and other junk-food wrappings, and whatever sweat-filled clothes, gloves, mitts, hats, get torn-away minutes after the first face-off?
Austin: umm yeah, basically. But we’re getting a new TV anyway aren’t we, cause the one we just got is busted?
Dan: You mean the brand new TV that already has a permanent X-BOX 360 burned-in image of Sid-the-kid?
Austin: umm, yeah, well okay, yeah that one … So can we? Besides, with all that global warming stuff you keep talking about, isn’t this, like, the only chance we’ll ever get?
Dan: {thinking to myself, damn! he got me! … but as a general rule, we never tell the kids to (you know what) OFF! just because they occasionally “get us.” But there it was, strategy 101 used against me by my own kid. Now of course you have to know I was going to say yes all-along, and in fact I could hardly wait to get out there myself and get started, but I was also under orders from the real boss of this household to have the X-MAS tree down before she got home from her l-o-n-g Sunday shift. So, not willing to be completely de-strategized by a 13 year old, I replied} Great idea, son, but first I gotta take down the x-mas tree, reorganize the storage room, clean-out the entire garage, tidy your room, and have dinner ready by 7.
Austin: I’ll do it
Dan: You’ll do what?
Austin: umm, tidy my room?
Dan: Excuse me?
Austin: Okay-okay, I’ll help you with all of it.
Dan: Homework?
Austin: Yeah, that too.
Dan: {Bingo! Mission Impossible, accomplished!}
So there we were, three hours later on Sunday after all the chores were done – yes honey the tree is actually put away and have you seen the storage room and the garage? – shoveling what snow we had in the backyard into a perfect rectangle, and of course searching hi-and-low for spare nozzles and hoses, because someone, who shall remain nameless, forgot that sprinklers, nozzles, and hoses left on the side of a house, even in Oakville Ontario, can still freeze rock-solid, even in 2007.
But hey, what else are laundry tubs for (besides emergency hand-washes, cleaning paint-brushes, and bathing the dog) if not for trying to pressure-fill out the ice with hot water, that which the physical laws of nature won’t do nearly fast enough for an impetuous 13 and 48 year old. Okay fine, 49 in four days!
Alas, here we are only a couple of days later, it’s 5 o’clock in the morning and I am standing outside in subzero temperatures, bundled-up like frosty, soak-filled gloves frozen to a steal nozzle, flooding our backyard while, “kid-Austin” slumbers.
But it wasn’t just the yard that was being flooded. Indeed my mind was just as flooded, if not more so, with long-ago memories of my own youth in Montreal’s West Island suburb of Dollard Des Ormeaux. A time when there were more outdoor rinks than Tim Horton’s. It was also a time when rinks flooded in November lasted until March and beyond.
Today, the dog didn’t get her usual lunchtime walk to the mailbox. Instead we drove the few blocks to Austin’s school where at precisely 11:21 a.m. a 13 year old teenager who usually can’t be pried-away from his lunch-time activities with friends, couldn’t get in the car fast enough to come home for lunch because I promised the rink would be skate-able by noon. Skate-able it was, and skate he did. Very first to use it, was the plan, before the rest of the “team” surely descends.
Among the 20 heartfelt thank-yous, the five hugs, and the lone tear (mine), there was only one question from the little-guy who’s seemingly no longer so little?
Austin: So how long do you think we will have it for … will it be like when you were a kid?
Dan: That buddy, is not a question I can answer or a promise I can keep. But I do promise I’ll keep working at it so that one day you can do the same for your kids, and your kids kids. Deal?
Austin: DEAL!