Sunday, August 26, 2007

"To _____,Your Friend, Wayne Gretzky 99"

When you grew up in a non-hockey family, what did four Stanley Cups and running mean to you? Not much. It was great to talk about it with friends, "Oilers are awesome." "Yeah!" , but that's about where it ended.

I don't know exactly what her connection with him was, but my Grandma was on close enough terms with Wayne Gretzky that they spent time together and he came over for dinner, and all that old boring stuff. When you're a kid, anyone who hangs out with Grandma can't be that cool, after all. So when she got me a photo of him that he'd personalized, it went into my pile of junk in the closet.

I'd pull it out and look at it from time to time, and think I even hung it on the wall for a few months, but mostly it was hidden away in dark obscurity among old school papers and drawings of ufo's and robots fighting armoured dragons for dominion of earth. (And strangely, toothpaste. I used to draw an awful lot of toothpaste. Big, long trails of it squeezed out by some character who looked way too happy with himself... Let's not explore that.)

One afternoon, in a moment I regret to this day, I threw it all out.

Why? I have no idea. Maybe I was thinking I had to clear shit up in my room, maybe I thought I was getting too old for all that baby stuff, I don't know.

Grandma has since passed on, Wayne is in Phoenix and I'll never be as close to him again as I never knew I was in the 80's , and that small treasure that I didn't appreciate is forever gone, disintegrating next to a Garbage Pail Kid card and a little He-Man comic book detailing the history of Greyskull and the rise of Skeletor.

Lament.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's too bad, I mean it was something that connected with your grannie too :(