We’ve been back in Pennsylvania for a week. It was 8º this morning.
Eight. Degrees.
That’s the way things go, though, isn’t it? You come back to the place you’ve made your home, you go back to work, get back in the groove of living your life. And sometimes when you get back, it’s eight freaking degrees outside. But that’s okay. Life is good. My friends and I went to California, became Group 9 for the weekend, and I had another story to write about.
Intention and obstacles. That’s what you need to tell a good story. Your heroes must have intention, and then obstacles must be thrown in their path that they must overcome.
Sadly then, maybe this west coast Hockey House reunion isn’t a story that’s going to set the world on fire. The intention is there: a bunch of us fly to California and see our friend who moved out there over thirty years ago. That’s pretty good. But our obstacles? This is where things fall apart. Our obstacles were feeble: Taking a few days off from work. Saving up a bit of money for an airline ticket. Scheduling. Pretty pathetic as obstacles go.
(For me, the biggest thing standing in the way was overcoming the inertia of my everyday life … deciding that instead of chugging along doing the same thing this weekend that I did the weekend before and the weekend before that, I would take hold of the immense, heavy rudder guiding me forward through life and nudge it, just a little bit, and steer into different waters. It’s easy to look at that big, seemingly unmovable rudder and think, “maybe another time.”)
So I’ll stop trying to tell a story and focus on the characters instead. They’re pretty good characters—each with their own little quirks and tendencies, each with their own nutty history, each deep with decades of experience. It’s a solid cast of characters; a major gathering of knuckleheads that I’ve known for most of my sixty years; goofballs I’ve lived with, laughed with, told the same stories a million times with, forced to be in all my Super 8 movies, and of course, played hockey with.
You know what? I’ll take that. That works for me.
Loved every minute of this story (even though I was reading it on my tiny phone and going blind). Mom and I passed the phone back and forth, reading out loud.
Mom said “you all are a lucky bunch of guys with a friendship that will last a life time!””
You’ve got the big new computer downstairs and you read all that on your phone? You kook.
Glad you both liked it!