Wendel Fart--I mean "Clark"

I'm not even joking, that's my first hockey related memory. Still, the details of my childhood are kind of fuzzy...I suspect I may have suppressed most of the details due to some form of grade school gym class trauma--but I digress.

When my family moved to the Great White North in '92 from Taiwan, I was only 5 years old and English was still a new language to my brother and I. He was a couple of years older than me and you know boys at that age, they're all giggles with their fart jokes and armpit noises. Whenever someone said the name "Wendel Clark", he would counter with "What? Wendel FART?" and thought he was the funniest person in the entire universe. I wonder if he knew that Mr. Clark could readily kick his butt if he heard him disrespecting him like that.

I frankly had no idea what the heck they were talking about until I sat in on one of my cousin and brother's street hockey games. We lived in the suburbs and this was before the Internet was the cool thing to do. Our families couldn't really afford real nets so we just used empty flower pots, turned them upside down and used them as goal posts. It was alot easier to clear whenever there was a car driving by. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world but they wouldn't let me play because I was 1) a girl, 2) five years younger than all of them and 3) wearing a skirt...with suspenders. [Shush, my mom was dressing me back then, okay? I can assure you that that is no longer the case]

I caught my first hockey game on Hockey Night in Canada one random Saturday and decided that what I was watching was about a million times better than whatever the heck my brother and his friends were doing outside on the road. Of course our beloved team was the Toronto Maple Leafs. My brother collected hockey cards and we would listen to the games on the Fan 590 since we were only allowed an hour of T.V. every night. My brother might have been still learning English but he became very adept at shouting "He shoots, he scores!" I remember thinking to myself how funny looking Pat Burns was with his moustache and I've missed seeing him behind the bench ever since he left. I went through this sort of dry period when I stopped paying attention to hockey but then I saw the Ottawa Senators play after the lockout and decided, you know what? This game is pretty freaking awesome and there's no shame in loving the Senators anymore. I'll just have to be a little bit more careful whenever I'm walking down the street.

I'm not really sure how to answer why I stuck with it. As a Canadian, that's simply not something you ask yourself. If you do, the mounties will come-a-knockin' at your door and demand your passport and your citizenship card back. And I had to take a test to get mine. It was hard.

Okay, no it wasn't.

I shall tackle the Creative Challenge tomorrow since this day has been way too long already.