This week has been a little rough on me. I have a bum knee, infected corneas, and no captain. The knee is from ice-skating a bit too ambitiously when I was in Detroit last weekend. Until the crash, things were dreamy. It was a perfect, cloudless Saturday afternoon and so, other than the guard, my dad and I were the only people crazy enough to be spending it indoors on a sheet of ice. That translated into a lot of open ice for us–open ice for me to colossally screw up a forward-to-backward transition on. I’ve never had such a disorienting, catastrophic crash. I gathered my wits and kept skating, though; about a dozen skaters joined us over the course of the session–about the number that play in a hockey game–so we still had tremendously open ice, an opportunity not to be wasted. But at the end of it my knee was swollen up like a grapefruit. It was only later that I discovered that two of the knee’s most basic functions were functioning painfully: bending and bearing weight. Whoops. I’ll be seeing a doctor shortly.
Moving along to bad corneas, while I don’t recommend them, they are pretty easy to come by. Simply wear the same pair of daily wear contact lenses for about eighteen months, marveling at all the money you are saving. A mere fourteen or fifteen months might even do the trick! Of course, you will then not be able to wear contacts for ten days or so while treating your eyes with $150 eye drops (I advise you to have a prescription drug plan), but think not of that–think of all the cash you saved over the previous year and a half, and savor the memory, for from here on out your optometrist will prescribe only disposable lenses for your sorry self. For added adventure, be sure the glasses you are resigned to wearing while your eyes heal are at least eight years old. Drive carefully.
As for the captain, it’s a painful goodbye but one that’s firmly in the better-to-have-loved-and-lost category. Steve Yzerman retired Monday as the longest-serving team captain in NHL history. He gave me hockey, essentially. What I felt watching him play for the Red Wings was as intense as many of my experiences of great art. If you aren’t a sports fan that may sound absurd. It might sound absurd even if you are. I never felt it about another athlete before, and I don’t expect to again. It was a unique experience. Thanks, Stevie Y.