Well, dear readers, subscribers (all 13 of you), and SmileyNDE (I know you're out there), it's been a long time since my last blog post, this is true. When last you read, I was picking up dog poo at and Animal School in Warren, Rhode Island, and that was about it. Well, my professional career has improved. I now work for a Fortune 500 company as an administrative assistant in the rehabilitation departments of three different nursing homes, as well as for the district as a whole. It's a lot of work, but it pays the bills and provides me plenty of time for my personal life.
But all of that news is just an update. I realize it's boring.
My Sunday mornings as of late provide the real entertainment in my life. I have been meeting on Federal Hill in Providence, the "Little Italy" of the city, to play afternoon street hockey with some colorful characters. For the most part, I would describe them as hard-working, hard-drinking, blue collar, hockey superfans. Several of them wear Boston or Providence Bruins jerseys over their hooded flannel sweatshirts. One guy always plays in a thin black leather jacket; another guy, Mikey Nails, is missing all of his top teeth from bicuspid to bicuspid. They affix soccer shin guards to the outside of their grey sweatpants with electrical tape. The goalies play with second base gloves.
We congregate behind an elementary school, and play for 2 - 3 hours on a portion of a back parking lot. I was invited my first week by a friend on the Providence Rugby Club, Meaty, and have been going back ever since. I'm known as, "the guy in the pink hat," for the Goorin pink knitted hat I wear each week. Street hockey is not at all like field hockey, or ice hockey; it is a sport entirely unto itself, especially in this company. I'm constantly being rotated between forward and defense--it seems I haven't found a position where either the team or myself is entirely comfortable.
We play, usually, with a hard yellow plastic ball, which is always sailing over one of the fences and into the houses or cars on the opposite side of the street. After temporarily losing the yellow ball last week, someone threw in a pink ball, which was almost immediately thrown back in disgust. "We don't play wit' no pink balls out here," one guy in a running suit adamantly shouted back at the sidelines. "We don't got no pickle smoochers on this team!" A few of the guys looked at me and then up at my knitted hat.
"Pickle smoocher." What an inventive term, I was thinking. There was a sense in the air that I should reply. The game play had temporarily stopped and everyone seemed to be looking back at me, as if this was my moment to stand and defend myself, to come back with something that would affirm my place on this parking lot, my right to be there. The moment was becoming too long. I shifted my stance, pushed up the brim of my hat with my ice hockey glove, tapped the ground with the end of my stick twice and shouted back, ... "YEah!"
