He says the ccms are better for a skater of some experience or a hockey player. For the novice, he recommends a pair of skates by Nike. All I know about Nike is sweatshops and running shoes; I’m surprised to learn they make skates. The Nike skates apparently are renowned for their ankle support system. That’s what he calls it, a system. I buy them.
While my friend from Lahore is sharpening the skates, I prowl the aisle looking for a helmet, size large. In my day, no one in the nhl wore a helmet, which made the players instantly recognizable, rendered them human. You didn’t have to read their names on the backs of their jerseys. I try on perhaps five helmets, all marked large. They are all too small. No helmet, I’m out of the class. I scan the web. I drive to hockey stores and Wal-Mart and used sporting goods stores on the fringes of the city. Finally at a distant Tire, I find a helmet that fits—barely—but hurts my ears. I buy it.
Lesson two: Realizing the parlous state of our expertise, Debbie decides to teach us how to fall. In my case, learning to fall is a bit redundant, simply grafting a technique onto what I’ve been doing since I started. More importantly for me, she teaches us how to get up after a fall. We raise one leg, bent at the knee, then use it to push up the other leg.
Debbie thinks my skate laces are too tight, causing my feet to go to sleep. I loosen the laces. I fall down again. I think about my hockey hero, Ted Lindsay. Small and deft, wired to some internal isotope that fired him around the rink like a pinball. Fists like tiny razors. Lindsay captured my imagination in a way no other sports figure, with the exception of Ted Williams, has. They had something in common, a contempt for losing and the determination to be their own man. As I get up, I think of little Ted and the face of a thousand stitches and wonder if I should buy a Red Wings jersey.
Lesson three: In this class, Debbie teaches us how to push off on the lead skate and shift weight to the other, to push from back to front, essentially, to create a forward rhythm. She follows this with a basic lesson on balance. She shows us how to glide on one skate while lifting the other and holding it to a count of ten.
The instant I raise my left skate, the right slips out ahead of me. I come down hard with the left skate to compensate and stay upright. I shift my weight to the rear. This causes me to lose my purchase on the ice with the right skate.
I crash to the ice, full weight coming down on my left knee. The pain shoots directly from the patella to my brainpan. I cry out and begin to writhe around on the ice. The pain is stupefying. Debbie and my classmates are solicitous. The next day I am back at the Tire, looking for knee pads. The pads are too clunky, so my friend Reynold Gonsalves, who was born in Jamaica, lends me his Rollerblade knee pads. Now in terms of body armour, I have the helmet, the elbow pads, the knee pads. I look like my son’s Ninja Turtle.
The six of us in the class are quite purposeful. Like me, Nick, the quiet Englishman, wants to skate the Rideau Canal from Dows Lake to the Chateau Laurier. Reynold wants to enjoy winter more. Ali Mustapha, the Iraqi, is an engineer and does something with computers. His attention is somewhat distracted by the upcoming Iraq elections in January. He will vote in Mississauga, the first time in his life he has cast a ballot in a free election. He is quite excited, smiling at the prospect. He is desperate to learn how to skate.
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