A hint of trouble
My father’s memory began to retreat on the afternoon of Feb. 24th, 2002. That day Canada was playing the United States in the gold medal hockey game at the Salt Lake City Olympics, and our family had convened at my younger sister’s house to watch. It was our preferred venue for big games: Stanley Cup playoff games involving the Leafs, the occasional World Cup tournament and, of course, this, the Olympics. Ramping up the national pride stakes was the then-recent scandal involving Canadian figure skating pair Jamie Salé and David Pelletier and the infamous “French judge,” who’d colluded with the head of the French skating organization to deny them a gold medal. In addition, the Canadian women’s hockey team had three days before come back (improbably, in the face of a favoured American team and terrible officiating from a home-town referee) to win the gold in women’s hockey. From a Canadian clannish-family, hockey-oriented view, the drama couldn’t have been more perfect.
My father — and my memory of this is perversely clear — was sitting in his usual seat at my sister’s, a green upholstered armchair to the left of the kitchen door. I was on my less-than-comfortable good-luck kitchen chair jammed beside the couch, with a loonie under my ass. This was an innovation seized on by my sister; it was meant to mimic the loonie that had been buried under the centre red line at the Olympic arena. At first, neither loonie seemed to be working. The Americans had a 1-0 lead, despite being outplayed. But then Paul Kariya scored for Canada, and when teammate Jarome Iginla scored less than four minutes later, my sister’s living room — and presumably the nation — went wild.
“Is this happening now?” my father asked.
The dawning of something irreversible
Everyone looked at him. A little switch had been thrown; it hung there in the air, the dawning of something begun that could not be reversed.
“What do you mean now, Abe?” asked my brother-in-law.
“Isn’t this a tape of an old game, something that happened awhile ago? I think I remember it awhile ago, no? What is this?”
“It’s live, Abe,” my brother-in-law said. “It’s the Olympics, in Salt Lake City, you know. This is the gold medal game. So it’s happening right now.”
“No kidding,” my father said. He didn’t look at all disturbed, just mildly bemused. He was regarding the screen with a certain fixation, but not one fixed precisely on the game. It was as though he was seeing through the TV to another locale, hearing a private voice we weren’t privy to. “Isn’t that a kick in the head?”
It got a big laugh: my father the cute, my father the impish. He still has it, our collective inner voice said. He’s just getting old. He’s 80, what do you expect? Old people forget things. The important point was that the Canadians were scoring goals in bunches now, and winning the Olympic gold.
But I knew.
