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Issue 24 - November, 2003

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The Street: Langton Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1967

The dead tennis ball is given a second life. We made the rules and we made no more than we needed.

Mostly it had to do with a sense of how much space you would give a guy when the ball jumped the curb and you had to put the ball back into play. Or how long you could hold a ball if you caught a pass through the air. We played in our street in north Toronto. In the T intersection. One net set against the curb that was the edge of our park, the middle of the top bar of the T. The other net set about sixty feet away in the middle of our street. We would stop play when a car needed the road more than us. Somebody would yell, "Car." It was understood that everybody moved from the middle of the road for the car and then moved back and we would restart. There was no BS about trying to take a big advantage out of the stoppage. We would play with up to eight guys. You got to have rules.

Ernie's house was the second fron the corner. I guess he was working in his backyard, finished and came to watch us. Standing in the driveway of his place. He was a little guy, less than five foot five. We knew he had been in the war. He had two daughters and no sons. His daughters didn't have much to do with us, they had friends somewhere else in the neighbourhood. Or we weren't much interested in girls yet.

I don't know how long he watched us, but eventually the ball came up on his lawn. He picked it up and threw it to us. I was playing net and didn't hear what he said. Tommy moved out of net and Ernie took the goalie stick and the catching glove. Tommy picked up a spare stick and the play resumed. They worked the ball up, rushed into my end and shot wide. Eddie went into the park to pick it up.

He got a pass wide to Don on the the T bar, which was an advantage in breaking out, although it could hurt you when the others came back on offense, because it gave them more room to work the puck around, passing room.

They got a shot on Ernie and he steered the rebound wide. He played the angle on the next one. Eddie tried to deke him right but it didn't work. Ernie was quick, his reflexes were good. Tommy fired a pass up and it got by Frank, it rolled toward me in the net, rolled to my left.

I got ready for it. I put my left hand with the baseball fielder's glove low on the stick shaft and slapped a slow chopping swing at the ball to clear it back down to the other end. It was a slow shot that went high and had side spin. It floated over the edge of Johnston's lawn, floated in a curve past the guys on a line for their net.

Ernie got ready for it coming out for the angle, put his legs together, but he misjudged the curve and the timing of the ball's arrival. It floated on, still curving slowly and bounced past him hopping into the net. Like it was in slow motion. It was a soft goal. He knew it. We all knew it.

I felt bad because I hadn't even tried to score a goal. I had just cleared the ball. I had punctured his enjoyment of the game. He gave the goalie stick and glove to Tommy. We waited for a moment.

Ernie walked down his driveway and back to his backyard. A ball turret gunner in the Dambusters.

www.bluetyger.ca ---- Contents Copyright (C)1993, 2003 William J. Gibson. This poem first appeared in The Overshoe Hockey League and Other Poems, 1993, Alburnum Press.

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