For a stretch of about seven years I didn't watch the Super Bowl. It fell on the same weekend as an annual, silent retreat that I attended in Cochrane Alberta. Jim and I, and sometimes Don, would drive down from Edmonton, arriving at the Mt. St. Francis Retreat just in time for the Friday night spaghetti dinner. After dropping our bags in the small, single rooms, we would rendezvous with twenty-five other men in the dining room. The chatter would continue up to the end of dinner, when silence began. Then we would file into a comfortable meeting room for the first of five, guided spiritual seminars.
The retreat house lay on the north side of large hill, immediately above a steep, wooded slope down to a meandering creek. The Franciscan monks had cut trails through the woods. During the periods between seminars, we would walk the grounds, sometimes heading down to the creek, and sometimes climbing the hill overlooking Cochrane. From year to year, we could never predict the weather. Some years we bundled in our jackets, hats and mittens against bitterly cold winds; in other years, we perspired as we climbed the hill on a clear, chinook afternoon to visit the old native, tent circles. I remember most the chickadees, calling and buzzing in the woods along the slope and hillside -- especially on the warmer days, when their call, "spring's here" didn't seem quite so ridiculously optimistic as it should have at the end of January.
I didn't climb any hills this past Sunday. After a lazy morning, I grabbed my skates and walked five minutes down to the canal. Finding a place on a bench down on the ice between a pretty student and a mother helping her toddler, I tugged and snugged the skates on my feet. The crowd around the stairs and benches created a moving obstacle course. My first few steps toward the ice were tentative and shakey Then I stumbled onto clear ice and into a choppy gait, and in another minute or two I settled into a smooth, comfortable pace.
I consider it a minor miracle that I can skate, however poorly. My parents grew up in England, and neither one of them skated. My father purchased my first skates at an auction or garage sale, probably in a box of shoes. He didn't know that they needed sharpening, and I vaguely recall that they didn't quite fit. For many years, we lived in Victoria, where the only ice lay inside the local hockey arena. I tried skating twice, and both times finished the adventure with a trip to the Emergency Room for stitches in my chin. In fact, I didn't really begin skating until I was nearly thirty, when Susan (my ex-wife) and I moved to Ottawa. We lived for a while in the Glebe and would skate to the University of Ottawa on those mornings when the ice and weather would permit. I learned a steady, straight-ahead technique, and when feeling daring, would sometimes add a crossover step or two. To this day, I cannot stop without grabbing something or tracing a looping spiral to an unsteady, splay-footed stance. But I can get from one point to another, and it gives me pleasure to know that I can move by all four means of locomotion required of a true Canadian: skates, skis, canoe and bicycle.
On this particular Super Bowl Sunday, I cruised along with the colorful crowd down past Lansdowne Park, around Dow's Lake, up to the locks, and then back down to the University. About halfway, the sun broke through the clouds and glinted off the ice. I unzipped my jacket and vest, and felt quite comfortable with only a flannel shirt and my polypropylene long underwear against the mild afternoon air. Only during the last kilometre or two, did I begin to feel the fatigue of the unfamiliar motion as a tightening in my thighs and buttocks. Still, I enjoyed the pleasure of taking off my skates, and the stretch of my legs as I walked back home.
And, of course, I wrapped up the day by settling on to the couch to watch the Giants beat the Patriots. A good ending.
