Holding tongue…

Last Fall I was visiting with three families from the elementary school where I used to work…

An invitation for after school milk and cookies,

quickly morphed into lasagna and watching a novice hockey practice at Planet Ice…

One of my former students and his father have dyslexia…

Despite the fact that I have worked with students who have been suspected to have dyslexia,

with curricular pressure to teach them to read and write fluently,

by the end of grade one,

I don’t know very much about it…

But I learned something that night…

Something I knew but didn’t have the words for…

Something about seeing multi-dimensionally…

Imagine looking at a slice of layer cake and seeing the slice from every angle,

spherically,

all at once…

And then not getting that the rest of your fellow human beings don’t see things the same way that you do,

or with the same velocity…

And imagine seeing that way and then being asked to read and write two dimensional print…

Sounds like yesterdays news to me,

and a six-lane supra-freeway full of way too much information,

trying to funnel it’s way down into the carpool lane,

under duress…

An individual would really have to dumb themselves down in order to process at that rate…

When I watch hockey and I see a player experience an injury I feel from every dimension…

I feel the pain of the person who has been hit…

I feel the pain of the hitter who has blocked his feelings of responsibility and remorse…

I feel the pain of the teammates,

the wife,

the mother,

the child,

and every other family member to whom that injured player is connected…

I feel the father,

the son,

and the holy ghost…

My slice of layer cake is thickly iced with physical and emotional pain…

This is big time hurting,

and it is non-local…

Which leads me to some simple arithmetic…

howmanyconcussions+howmuchbraindamage=animmediatemoratoriumonhittingintheNHLstartingrightNOW

At this very moment I feel like someone on the opposing team took the knob of their stick and rammed it into my occiput,

and then their buddy came up and slammed me across the shoulders crushing me into the boards,

in order to finish me off just for the fun of it…

Little Gem always reminds me,

just in case I’m suffering from memory loss due to a past concussion…

Mama, we live one long life,

moving in and out of different packages…

One day this life will be in the past too…

When she says things like that I don’t ask her to back up her statements,

by quoting a scientist or a philosopher…

And I don’t grill her on where she got her information…

I take her word for it,

because what she says rattles my cage,

with no question…

History repeats itself,

until a warrior and a caregiver meet as one and say,

Come hell or high water,

this time around we are doing things differently…

The only kind contact allowed is a love tap…

The kind of tapping we saw between Luongo and Demitra when they looked at each other in the post-Canada vs. Slovakia game while they were shaking hands…

Love ,

all laced up and earned,

with regard,

respect,

and the sound of character…

Rainy day people always seem to know when it's time to call...