Catching An Edge

I spent the better part of the weekend down in town at my parents, camped out in front of the computer, watching the Minnesota High School Boys Hockey Tournament. It was some of the best tournament action in years and we even had the pleasure of having a northern team to cheer for in both the Class A and Class AA championship games.

When you watch a lot of hockey, you notice a fair amount of players take spills to the ice. Most players who end up falling are checked or bumped by other players, but every once in a while you see a player skating along, seemingly uninhibited, suddenly topple. In the world of hockey, we call it catching an edge. A hockey skate is sharpened to have two edges: the inner and the outer. The edges allow you to turn easily, but once in a while you'll be skating on the flat of your skate only to turn your foot just so an edge grabs the ice and throws off your balance. Down you go.

This weekend ended with me catching the proverbial edge. Nothing heartbreaking, nothing terribly life changing, just a bad break.

As a former hockey player (did you know?), I can assure you that catching an edge is embarrassing, always untimely, and never without consequences. But I've caught a few edges in my day, both on and off the ice, and I've learned from those many tumbles.

When you stop sliding down the ice, you've got to pull yourself to the your feet as quickly as possible. Sure you might be a little behind the play now. But if you skate hard enough, you can make it seem like it never happened. And sooner or later, you'll get a chance to catch your breath.

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Life without a Television

I grew up in a household lacking a television, but least you fear my brother and I were raised as some northern hybrid of the "homeschool jungle freak," let me assure you that we did not spend our afternoons studying up for the National Spelling Bee. In the summer months, our maternal grandparents were our next door neighbors and more afternoons than not, we'd head over for our diet pop and a couple hours in front of the tube, watching Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon (and later on, MTV and VH1), slowly turning our brains into a soft jelly.

During the winter, my grandparents headed south, forcing us two kids to depend on the library for some old fashioned entertainment. In college, I enjoyed the hundreds of complimentary cable channels that came with on-campus living and quickly discovered that people really meant it when they said "there's nothing on." Now that I'm on my own, I once again live in a household without a television and it's hard to miss the blaring, commercial ridden box when there's Netflix.

Through it all, there's always been a time every year when everyone in my family actively seeks out a television.

Yep, Minnesota High School Boys Hockey tournament time! The four-day tournament always takes place in St. Paul over the second weekend of March. It almost always handily coincides with my birthday (including my birth day) and I have gone so far as to have friends tape the championship games on the two occasions when I've been out of the country during the tournament. Needless to say, the tournament offers the best hockey in the world. The color commentary of intrepid tournament announcer Lou Nanne is basically the soundtrack to this annual weekend at my house.

Over the years, we've come up with pretty creative ways to get around the fact that none of us own a television to watch the tournament. One time, my father (who always walks or bikes to work) came home from work with a borrowed t.v. so small, it fit inside his backpack. If I remember correctly, the only thing the teeny t.v. ever displayed was a whole lot of static. Another time, we borrowed a larger television, but the set only got reception in our (unfinished) basement. That year we huddled around the t.v. on the concrete floor between the wood pile and roaring furnace. More often that not, we ended up crashing at the (sometimes unheated) home of some out of town accommodating friend or relative to get our annual fill of hockey.

The ridiculous television adventures seem destined to continue. Just last weekend, I headed over to the neighbors' for some Oscar viewing. We figured we could stream the awards show, but the only thing streaming was a backstage commentary, complete with the thank you cam and press conferences, but no actual shots of the actually ceremony. Figuring out who actually won required careful deductive skills. But that's just life in the woods, alienated from the world of popular culture.   

As for the hockey tournament this year, Mom says she's figured out a way to stream it. We'll just see how that goes, eh?

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