Assignment #3 - Incomplete.

I can't find the completed version of this, and I can't find Assignment #4 at all. I will keep looking. In the meantime, here.

Every Saturday, my whole family (along with most of the population of whichever town we were in that winter) congregated at the rink to watch my brothers and their friends play. The spectators would watch voraciously, waiting for the next breakaway, the next goal, the next huge save or glove-dropping fight. The crowd’s steady murmur would swell with each swing of the game’s pendulum, and for a moment, they were satiated.

I watched too, with a different kind of hunger. I watched them move, the grace of them – the immense power of every stride held in check by pure economy of motion – they were like coiled springs, crouching predators ready to pounce at the first sign of weakness.

But, in Small Town, Alberta, it was a well-established fact that girls did not play hockey.

Girls were, of course, permitted to skate – only figure skating, though. My older sister was a fairly gifted figure skater. Even my eldest brother, despite being the goalie for the Bantam team, skated too – and theirs was a different kind of grace. No economy there; everything made up of florid gestures and great sweeping strides.

I did try, when my parents enrolled me. I tried to learn. But have you ever seen the blade of a figure skate? They jut out at the toe with a gnashing row of steel teeth, just waiting to bite into the ice and bring me to a screeching halt – usually on my face. I tried for five miserable winters, each filled with bruised hips and scraped knees and elbows. When I was ten, I gave up. I would never be a skater.

Thirteen years later, I had still never learned to skate. But several events in my life had made me reevaluate my own priorities, and on a whim born of that long-ago longing, I asked my youngest big brother to help me do something for myself. I asked him to help me buy hockey skates.

I was then, as I am now, a full-time university student, which essentially translates to mean that I could under no circumstances afford to buy brand-new skates for myself. So Conor, my brother, started us off at one of the larger used sporting-goods shops in the city. After only a few minutes, we left – he, frustrated, and I disheartened. It seemed that my silly little desire to finally learn to skate, to create for myself, in the wake of so much sadness, something wholly mine, was not to be fulfilled. Conor, though, was less easily dissuaded, and took me to another, and then another shop, where, he hoped, the prices of used skates would prove less prohibitive. Finally, we came upon a rather unassuming-looking store called Totem. Neat, hand-lettered signs adorned the window, advertising skate sharpening and service. We pushed open the heavy door and entered into the cathedral stillness of the shop’s inner sanctum: the skate room. Rows upon rows of shelves greeted us, every one filled with skates. Conor set to, determined to find me a pair that met his approval and my budget. While he systematically examined and discarded pairs for various reasons (some of which I didn’t really understand – what do trucks have to do with whether or not I should buy this pair of skates?) I wandered in and out of the shells, looking without enough knowledge to really see. Just a few feet to one side of Conor, who now had several pairs lined up for fitting on a bench situated between the two shelves, I saw a lonely-looking pair off to one side by themselves – the last pair of size sixes, they didn’t fit on the shelf with the rest, and so had been sentenced to segregation on the sevens’ shelf. I picked them up to have a closer look, keenly aware that I didn’t really know what I was doing. The scars of countless battles with hockey sticks and the blades of other skates adorned the toes; the laces, though not new, were still strong and smooth to the touch. A label on the back read CCM Taks 773.

By this point Conor had approached me to see what had caught my attention. He picked up the skates, looked at them, and his eyes widened in surprise at the sight of the same label that had intrigued me so. He flipped them over, blade up, exposing their underbellies to the light. Running a finger around the rivets that held the blade to the boot, he smiled briefly. Then he looped two fingers around the blade housing (which, I have sinced learned, is what the term ‘truck’ refers to) and tugged alarmingly. His smile widened – apparently, these skates had passed some kind of test. He set them down next to the other pairs that he had picked out and bade me start trying them on.

I saved the pair that I had picked out myself for last. The first pair was most definitely too small; long enough, but not nearly the width that my strange, square little feet require.