Sinking Your Teeth into a Groundbreaking New History of Hockey, Part I

Part I. My Personal Hockey History

Skip to Part II, The Birth of Hockey: A Groundbreaking New World History

Eight years into my quarter-century marriage, my husband left me.

The Man I Married got on the motorcycle we’d driven cross-country together the summer before and drove himself to New Orleans. Which is almost as far as you can get from Seattle yet remain on this continent. To get much farther, he’d have to sell the bike and buy a boat. Believe me, he’s considered it.

On that cross-country motorcycle trip the prior summer, I had insisted that we stop in New Orleans; he insisted that we not. He had no desire to go to New Orleans and it went against our only requirements for the 10,000-mile trip: no cities, no major roads, no planning. But I had a literary passion for the Crescent City and craved the opportunity to fondle the wrought-iron gates through which Lestat and Kate Chopin had passed. We quarreled about whether to stop in New Orleans all the way from Puget Sound to Lake Michigan; from Lake Michigan to the Atlantic Ocean; from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. MIM continued to resist the increasing pull as we rumbled back west from Georgia to Florida to Alabama to Mississippi, while the ringing of “Stella!” grew louder in my ears until I could hear nothing else, least of all his protests that I was deviating from everything he held sacred about this trip.

Writers have no right to look this good, especially when not regularly bathing

He was reading Sun Tzu and had taken to fits of roadside contemplation in which he posed artfully in leather pants atop boulders and beside brooks, with a pen and a tiny notebook and an increasing amount of facial hair.