A Lesser Man

In the first flurry light of a promising powder day, I was clearing the back deck from 6 inches of  5% density snow.  As I skipped down the steps to clear the walk below, my front foot flew off of the icy ledge.  Gravity kicked in immediately and exponentially, as gravity will, and I began to violently compress my back leg, knee and ankle beneath me in a potentially unnatural and painful geometry.

Without thinking I reacted by powering up my back leg into a powerful Telemark type scrunch-squat, absorbing the compression, lunging off that single leg and sticking the landing on the walkway below.  "That would have killed a lesser man" I thought honestly to myself as I went on happily with the rest of my day.

Honor

The other day my old friend Chip and I were playing hockey with some college and high school kids at a local pond.  They were skating circles around us but we were having a great time in the cold purple and orange alpen-glow of an early winters dusk.  We contributed some outstanding no-look passes now and then and even played some tenacious defense, when we could catch up.

When we finished we talked about where they were from and who they played hockey for as we passed around a bottle of Jameson and they smoked ridiculously fat, frat boy cigars.  They asked us how long we had been skating in the neighborhood and we looked at each other and said with disbelief, '40 years'.

The young bucks shook our hands on the way out and the last one said with all sincerity, 'It was an honor skating with you sir.'  Which is nice.