Hockey fever: Georgetown, Ontario, 1963
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
― Madeleine L’Engle
This photo was taken in late March 1963, a year before our family left Georgetown for London, Ontario.
I am the boy on the far right. Our coach was, I believe, Mr. Roy Guest.
I played in the final game with a high fever and was so nervous that I didn’t sleep all night.
My parents had to go to Toronto that weekend, so I had stayed the night at the coach’s house.
In 1964, when I was 12 years old, our family moved from Georgetown to London Ontario. This permanent change of scene came as a devastating blow, complete with the typical leaving behind of school and friends, entailing the requisite adjustment to a new, bigger city culture. In Georgetown, my greatest joy in life and my escape hatch from the atmosphere of mania and acute anxiety that reigned in our family home was to play hockey and baseball year round, both street games and the more organized variety of team activities. Not only did I play these sports religiously but I also memorized a vast array of statistics gleaned from a massive collection of hockey and baseball cards purchased with money purloined from my heritage coin collection. Like Raymond, the autistic-spectrum character from the film Rain Man, I repeated sports statistics over and over in my head to quell chronic and near debilitating anxiety while I lay in bed sleepless night after night, the victim of acute insomnia that persists to this day.
I was a dud at sports and a disaster at school phys. ed., but I knew all the dope on all the players and cheered on my favorite teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Tigers, with a quiet desperation that bordered on the pathological.
I will write much more about kid hockey in Georgetown: on the frog pond; in the street (chased by police); attending the Georgetown bantam tournament; and many other stories.
Meanwhile here are three hockey-related stories that I’ve penned recently:
The Happy Brothers/ Les frères Šťastný – Robert McBryde
Ode to the Zamboni: in honour of the new hockey season – Robert McBryde
And the paragraph about moving posted here is taken from a story in my book entitled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny:
Choosing the right club – Robert McBryde
Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com
