Page 5 of Offside and Off-Limits
They wanted the rich, fun-loving, partying winger for the New York City Blades, the guy who would happily splash the cash, get them into club VIP sections, buy bottles of Cristal, and get recognized in the street.
I playacted that guy for years. Heck, Ibecamethat guy.
But it wasn’t real, and a part of me always knew it wouldn’t last. You can’t play pro hockey your whole life. Not even Marc-Andre Fleury could do that.
Then I hit my thirties and a bunch of my teammates began to settle down, some even starting families. Suddenly, the bachelor lifestyle lost its luster. It got old, all those parties, all those meaningless hook-ups. I wanted what those guys had, the ones who had met the one, who’d fallen in love, who’d committed themselves to one person for the rest of their lives.
There was this one guy on the Blades. Jethro Drake. He’d been one of my partners in partying crime, always up for going out on the town, always attracting a bevy of beauties wherever he went. And then he met Bella, a schoolteacher of all things, and it was like he had a total personality change overnight. One day he was party boy extraordinaire, and then the next he was accompanying Bella to her classroom after hours to decorate it with her students’ artwork.
At first, I didn’t get it. What was so special about this girl? But then I saw the way they looked at each other, and I felt it, right in my chest.
They were in love, and that wasn’t an emotion I was all that familiar with.
Or at all.
It was then that I lost the taste for the party scene, the puck bunnies, all of it.
I wanted what Drake and Bella had. Only I had no clue how to go about getting it.
I still don’t.
But that doesn’t stop me from wanting it.
Of course I didn't tell anybody about my change of heart, and my reputation has clung to me like a baby koala clings to its mom.
That was close to two years ago, and I swear, time moves faster than it once did back in the good old days. Blink and it’s two years later.
Man, getting old sucks.
But age does come with perks, including the fact that, as an Unrestricted Free Agent, I could intentionally sign with a team located not only across the country from where I’d played most of my professional life, but in a small town where I could get the chance to reinvent myself as the man I am now. Not the man I once was.
With Bess sitting in pride of place, I pull a Stanley knife from my back pocket and cut open a box. I pull out a framed photo of me, my mom, and my sister Tori and her two kids, taken last Thanksgiving. All of us are grinning at the camera. We’d just eaten our turkey dinner with Tori’s husband, Lionel, my aunt Liz and uncle Don, and then played charades, the football game on the TV muted as we laughed at our terrible miming.
I wonder what this Thanksgiving will be like, now that I’m across the country from them all, playing on a new team, no longer able to drive over to New Jersey to see them.
When I told my mom I would move her to Maple Falls if it worked out for me here, she smiled like it was Christmas day. But there’s no point in uprooting her life if this isn’t going to be my forever home.
And I won’t know that until I’ve settled in and found my feet.
“Nice place you got here, Lennox,” a voice says, and I look up to see Jamie Hayes, my former NYC Blades captain and nowfellow Ice Breaker, climbing over a bunch of boxes as he makes his way toward me.
“Hayes! Good to see you, my man,” I say as I clasp his hand in mine and slap him on his back. Like me, he’s in jeans and a hoodie.
“Good to see you, too, Lennox.”
“I’d offer you a coffee, but I’ve got no clue how to use the fancy machine that came with this place.” I gesture at the behemoth copper machine on one of the kitchen counters, looking like something from a Victorian locomotive.
“How’s the unpacking going?”
“We’re getting there,” I say.
He looks down at one of the boxes by his feet, labeled “Comics.” “You brought your comic books?”
“Of course I did,” I reply as though he’s asked me if I plan on breathing oxygen here in Maple Falls. “I’ve moved here, man. They go where I go. Period.”
“Is that why you’re always wearing tops with weird sayings?” He gestures at my black T-shirt with the words “Nexus Point” emblazoned across my chest.
“Don’t play dumb with me. You knowThe Timekeepers Chroniclesis da bomb.”
