SPEAKING OF SPORTS
December 1997
by Barry Stagg
STANLEY'S POND
The Christmas season has a special place in the hearts and memories of the graduates of the Stanley's Pond Hockey School. The Boswarlos based project had several generations of players and organizers. They all shovelled snow and eyed the November ice thickness in their respective times and places. It might have been 1947 or 1954 or 1961 or 1970 but the routine was the same and as timeless as birth and youth.
Skates were the key to entry into the hockey world of Stanley Harvey's tiny pond among the birch and fir. Skates tended to come at Christmas, if at all. Without skates, the ice was just a wistful thought for a youngster on the wrong side of the right Christmas. Skates under the Christmas fir were the key to communion with the gentle gods of hockey in the Newfoundland moonlight.
Come down the hill to the pond in the early morning and clear the few flurries from a perfect sheet of ice. Drag off these gaiters and haul on at least two pairs of the biggest wool socks before lacing on the skates from heaven (by way of mail order shopping). Glide in clumsy bliss while the rest of this generation's princes slip and slide through the trees to pond side.
The games are on by ten o'clock with some sort of magic hand of chaos guiding the group of bedlamers to team up and play through to eternal exhaustion. Eternity is the feeling of happy fatigue coupled with young, strong hearts giving it one or a dozen last whirls on a snowy rink in the cloudy moonlight. Immortality calls out to each of the skaters in the time of never ending play. What each youngster has yet to learn is as essential to the present bliss as is the moderate frost and steady moon beams. The boy has the right to learn of the sadness of life on another day in some faraway decade on the other side of Stanley's Pond. Tonight under the stars of 1961 he can revel in the joys of gliding and shooting and falling and rising and going and going and going until gone to slumber in the gentle night.
Far off in the distance are other lands and other lives living out the pathos and the exultation of failure and triumph, longing and receiving. These are the worlds that every youngster has the right to deny and refuse during the days of wonderful play. Let the addicts and fanatics wait on the other side. We remain safe here on the shores of Stanley's Pond guarded by the sentries of splendid isolation in the moonlight.
The moonlight is such a recurrent theme in this reverie about long ago icicles dripping in idyllic Boswarlos on a winter's evening. Without the moon there is no night game because Stanley and Teddy would not like a fire to take their woodlot that lives in cellulose grandeur around the shoreline of the community skating rink .
There are no grants of money needed to pay for the entry of the children of Boswarlos onto the snowbanked boards of this little village common. These memories of moonlight and commonweal are from another time before the modernity of welfare states and welfare states of mind. These times are gone to eternity along with the good parents and guardians of Boswarlos circa 1961. We remember the guardians of our state of sacred childhood just as we celebrate the memories of our hard working parents of an era when work was an unquestioned virtue. The guardians are noteworthy because in the wonderful case of the community skating rink on Stanley's Pond the owners were the bachelor brothers Harvey. Teddy and Stanley never questioned or indeed even consented to the annual frosty invasion of their lands by the local youngsters. It was their part of the community pact that shared the limited bounty of the place for the greater good.
There is no need for cheap nostalgia to lace the allegedly tepid liquor of these memories . These were real and powerful times when good people at home in their own lives and successful in their own time and place gave to each other in exquisitely unconscious ways. The days of the snow banked hard and icy along the finite shores of Stanley's Pond are as gone as the squires and matrons who peopled the pond with hopeful and joyous youngsters. In this Christmas season we can do no better than to raise a toast to their lives and the high quality of their times. To them we can salute : You brought us up well. Thank you.
Until next time: be proud, be prosperous.
Merry Christmas.