Spark plugs

It seems that I blinked and its Wednesday already. We've had some days off from school. We filled our time with:

letting the boys learn how to make pancakes for lunch and destroying the kitchen all at once

buying (with our Christmas gift cards) and building two new lego projects

playing lots of knee hockey

squabbling over lots of knee hockey

watching movies- Secretariat- we all loved

planning end of hockey season celebrations- yes really- the end-for now

Nolan's team plays in the Fargo Flyer Squirt International Tournament this Friday through Sunday to cap off their travel season.  128 A and B level Squirt teams from across the United States attend this event each year.  One of the highlights is the pins that are traded by the teams.  Nolan was so excited to get his pin book and pins.  The pins our team is going to trade are the 2011 Hockey Day Minnesota pins.  All the teams vie to have "the pin" that  everyone wants to collect.  We're hoping it may be our pin.

 



But this pin symbolizes a lot more than just the event of Hockey Day for me...
For awhile now, the rest of my words haven been stuck.  They're paralyzed, frozen in some cranny of a brain sustained only by hockey, ice, snow, winter, grey, and cold.  Thats why I didn't expect to reach into a box of hockey memorabilia and pull out an emotional spark plug.  I was simply asked to sift through a box of hockey history and memories, and piece the stories together for a book.  But my own memory kept getting in my way.  My own stories.  The ones I still have stuck in my head.
Like the last real conversation I had with my Dad, the day Hockey Day Minnesota was announced, last June.
I was excited when I called him.  Thrilled really.  Dad would love this!  He'd go, he'd watch and cheer from the stands.  Or he could watch on television from the comfort of his home.  My excitement escaped into my words pressuring them to trip over one another on their way out of my mouth.  But as I paused for a breath, I heard it.  The shallow and weak breathing from my Dad.  The faltering voice.  The thinly disguised enthusiasm.  My voice trailed off as I tried to reign it back in.  What had I been thinking?  He wouldn't be able to go.  He wouldn't even see it on television.  I was asking him to be excited for a day we both knew he would never see.  And there is was, hanging in the space of our words stretched across the telephone wire, the unstated acknowledgement that he really was leaving us soon. 
 It changed that day, the way we talked to each other.  The things we said.  The things we didn't say anymore...