Major minor

One of the great things about my partner is that she's a gamer. Up for just about anything. Well almost anything. Hockey on TV? Not a chance. Hockey live? She'll buy the tickets.

My Easter present was a pair to see the Toronto Marlies. This is our AHL team, one level below the NHL; a league of coming talent, guys playing out the string and career nearly-men. 

The Marlies name has a long history here. It was the Leaf's major junior team for decades. The Leafs played Saturday night at the Gardens, the Marlies on Sunday afternoon. It provided a steady stream of talent for the parent club until the beginning of the open draft era. The last great Marlies team of the mid-70s sent two stars to the Leafs: John Anderson and George Ferguson.  

These pro Marlies have their own arena, the Ricoh Coliseum down at the Ex. It's a cozy new barn, seating just under 8,000. A roomy, no frills sort of place to watch a game. Our seats were excellent, about 30 feet from the ice, between the centre line and the north blue line. Just about perfect.

The game was a bit of a dud for a neutral, but the home fans were happy. The Marlies scored four times in the first period against the Lake Erie Monsters (who hail from near Cleveland) and cruised to a 6-1 win. 

It's been a good season for the Marlies. They're first in their division. The team has a lot of veteran players to go with the prospects. Some of those prospects have spent a fair bit of time in the Bigs this season too. I don't really understand how championships are won in a developmental league like the AHL, I do remember that the last time Toronto's farm team did well, in the early 90s, it was a harbinger of good times for the senior side. So here's hoping the Marlies go deep this spring.

Hockey aside, the most interesting thing there was the crowd. I figure the arena was a bit under half full. There are clearly some hardcore fans in their Marlie jerseys, but we saw lots of Leafs jerseys too. Perhaps most touching was a trio of older guys in their St. John's Maple Leaf jerseys, one of them a former 14 year season ticket holder with the ex-franchise. But what stood out was the number of kids. There were entire minor hockey teams in their jerseys. Children running around the concourses, others high-fiving Duke the Dog, the team's mascot. In front of us was a dad with his two young daughters. He was, by turns, watching the game, feeding the kids, entertaining the kids, checking out their coloring book. Behind us, another family with youngsters. 

I see parents and kids heading off the Leafs games every Saturday night, actually it's mainly dads and sons and I'll see them pull into the parking lot across from work in pretty spiffy cars. 

We paid $30 each for our seats, the top ticket at Ricoh is $38. Imagine bringing two or three kids, with food, parking, a program. For the Marlies the bill would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $175 for the game. That buys you one less than one comparable seat at the ACC. 

NHL hockey up close is amazing. The quality of play, even for middling teams like Toronto's is excellent. TV captures some of that skill and speed, but there nothing like being able to see the whole ice from a good vantage point. You see the game in a different way. For most of us, it is a rare treat.

The AHL isn't the NHL, but it is pretty good. There aren't too many players on the ice who haven't been in an NHL camp or at had a cup of coffee at the top of the heap. The players don't make big league money, but they play like they want to. In some cities, it's the only game in town and the crowds are excellent, the media coverage considerable. 

Toronto doesn't happen to be one of those cities, and that doesn't make much sense to me. The families who populate the fan-base seem to get it. The team could just use more of them. Our media really only pays attention to the Leafs. Anything else is second-rate, even if it wins. Ironic, given this is the top farm team in the system.

But more importantly, the team gives fans something the Leafs doesn't: an affordable way to watch quality hockey. I could get to four Marlies games for the price of one gold at the ACC. And the odds are pretty good that in those four games the home team would win. I wouldn't make the same bet on the Leafs.

Most Canadians watch pro hockey on the tube. In-the-arena fandom at the

What is a weekend?

These days I am two things professionally: a shift worker and a weekend worker. 

The former identifies me as a member of a class of people that lives beyond the 9 to 5 existence that tends to define comfortable middle class-dom. The latter puts me in a select group of those that work outside the lines of a conventional career.

I work Thursday to Sunday. Two regular days on the ends, well regular in the sense that they're an eight-hour shift. Two long days in the middle, 12 hours each. Friday nights end at 10 p.m. Same for Saturday. 

From Friday morning on, the conventional weekend is shot.

The payback for this is an extra day off. My "weekend" is Monday to Wednesday. I've been doing this job for a little over six months now. 

I have worked weekends before, early in my career when saying no to crazy shifts was career-limiting. I was living with a Monday to Friday person, and over time the non-compatible schedule I kept got to me. I agitated to get off of it. 

Since then, weekend work has been episodic: major events, occasional backfill, a rotation. Something to be endured and sometimes embraced when the event was interesting, but not my life. 

Now I'm back into it. 

The work itself is not especially interesting. I am an assignment editor for a news department for a radio broadcaster. I tell reporters what to do. I make decisions, in concert with others, about what our organization should cover. I am a bit player in all this. There are others more senior who get to make more decisions. The bulk of mine are confined to the weekend and as such are limited in scope. I don't have anyone to assign. Ours is a Monday-to-Friday operation.

So once Friday afternoon rolls around and the A-Team sashays out for its conventional weekend, I am there to make sure nothing bad happens, or more accurately to make something happen if something bad happens. If the Space Shuttle plunges from the sky or a politician is assassinated or an earthquake strikes, I am the sure, experienced hand that will help lead my colleagues through the first crazy moments and get our news service pointed in the right direction. I am there essentially to react to events.

The rest of the time is really about treading water.

There is some planning, some talking, some editing, some chasing, a bit of thinking and a lot of watching. Watching TVs, computer screens, and out the window when the electronic screens give me a headache. 

The difference between weekdays and the weekend is striking. On Thursday and Friday there are people around. The shops nearby are open, all the lights are on, the building's ventilation system is functioning. By about 9 p.m. on Fridays, it's like a neutron bomb went off inside. People evaporate. The phones don't ring. Escalators are shut off until Monday morning. The lights all over the building get turned down and the air inside gets stale. The bathrooms start to smell bad. An mostly-empty office tower doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's designed to be used, not left fallow, so best to shut 'er down. 

Sometimes when you work in a place off-hours, it's possible to take a kind of special ownership: the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Not here. You have the run of the place, but you can't actually do much with it. You can't start ordering people to cover this and that, those people work Monday to Friday. It is its own special hell, Marley's Ghost tossing handfuls of money into the wind. 

For me, the strangest experience is leaving the office on Fridays and Saturdays. I head out the door and into the teeth of Toronto's entertainment district. Many Saturday nights I go just as Leaf fans are pulling out of the Air Canada Centre, or the theatres are disgorging their patrons. On the side streets, the lines are forming outside the nightclubs. Taxis crawl along trolling for tolls. Me? I have my bag slung over my shoulder and I am going home after work. 

Pulling a 12 hour shift pretty much guarantees that you're not going to want to party when it's over. You want to sleep, unwind, breathe fresh air. Watching people enjoying their time off  is like wandering through a beer commercial. I've grown out of the night-clubbing thing, but I have really missed the pleasures of a Saturday night out, or an end-of-week pint with colleagues, and sometimes resent my inability to partake. 

When I've done shift work before, one of the fringe benefits, such as they were, was the shared misery. There were usually other people working the same hours as you. At the end of the shift you could go off together to grab breakfast or a ridiculously early drink. There is no shared misery in this job, it's all mine. I come in alone and leave alone. That is perhaps the worst part of it. It's given me a new appreciation for those who toil alone at strange hours. 

There are lots of people who work weird hours who have satisfying careers. When I look on with a certain envy at the people who work on Hockey Night or the NFL or NCAA football, I have to remind myself that they are working a weekend too. It's just that their job seems a lot cooler than mine. I watch the morning TV people I am in awe of their ability to be so energetic at that time of day, and I'm glad they're there. It's reassuring. I wonder, though, how many of them are single? 

The weekend/shift-worker badge is something I wear with a certain grumpy pride, but it isn't one I intend to wear forever. All jobs teach you something, this one has taught me when I want to work. 

Friday is Good?

When I was a kid Good Friday was a lot like Christmas. It was a day where nothing happened. 

Schools were closed, so were stores, banks and offices. In my hometown, people seemed to keep to themselves and those who were looking for companionship went to church.

It was a day for quiet contemplation, the austere interlude before the colourful pageant of Easter.

My strongest memories of Good Friday were from my days singing in my church choir. The Good Friday service was as funereal as the day it marked. We sang a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. The altar was stripped, no flowers, no decorations. When the service was over I don't really remember much of what we did. I assume I played road hockey or watched TV or shot some hoops in the driveway, but really, I don't remember. Good Friday was a day where nothing happened.

This Good Friday I worked. 

It's a stat holiday in my workplace, and the managers weren't around but lots of working stiffs were. It felt like one of those long weekends that governments take off but the private sector doesn't. You can buy a car, but you can't get it licensed. The newspapers published as usual, public transit was working, there were people in the street. A not quite normal day, but not a day where nothing was happening either. 

I work a long shift on Fridays, 12 hours. When I book off around 10 p.m., I walk through the guts of Toronto's entertainment district on my way up to Queen Street to catch my streetcar. This Friday there didn't seem to be any action at Roy Thomson Hall or the Royal Alex, but the bars in the neighbourhod were open and the clubs on the side streets definitely were. The lineups were a bit shorter than usual for a Friday, but they were open. The faces of the nightclubbers looked about the same as usual; the polyglot mix of multi-culti Toronto. 

I found the experience disorienting. I guess I was expecting something, what? Deader. A Good Friday night where the city rolled up the sidewalks and went to bed early. Instead, I saw most of the restaurants on Queen Street open and doing a brisk business. Gawkers were checking out the Condom Shack. When I got off at Queen and Leslie Streets, the Duke was doing a good business as were the trio of restos on the north side of the street. 

It was a real contrast with a year ago in Mexico City. 

A Catholic country like that takes Holy Week very seriously. It is a week for travel, family and ritual. The air in Mexico City is breathable, the mountains that rings the city are in full view. The traffic is manageable. The signs of Easter are everywhere. Good Friday is quiet. And it felt familiar.

I'm not much of a church-goer anymore. I don't hold a particular place for Christian holidays in my calendar. But I do like the idea of stopping a few times a year, and when I mean stopping I mean everyone stopping. A day where you can't do any of the "normal" things: work, eat out, shop. You are left to your own devices. Christmas is still like this, but the Christmas season is not. Boxing Day is a shopping day now and December 24th is pretty busy too. It's only the 24 hours of December 25th that constitute a shut-down anymore. 

I can see how people of other faiths or cultural background would find all this frustrating. These communities have their own holidays and often have to take time off to mark them. Why do we have to take a day that is one religion's high holiday?

At least in the case of Christmas, I can argue that it has morphed into something more pagan, a winter fiesta of sorts: Happy Holidays and all that. But Good Friday is still fundamentally religious. It's hard to imagine this stat holiday turning into something secular or even ecumenical. It is about as Christian as you get, just like Passover is for a Jew or Ramadan to a Muslim. 

Way back when, when Good Friday became a day off, it was a religious holiday. Canada was overwhelmingly Christian and largely observant. It all made sense. My vestigal Christian reflexes let me be part of the day even if I am not actually Part of it anymore. But all the action on what was once my Day of the Dead tells me it doesn't make sense anymore. Good Friday belongs to the Christians, but it doesn't belong to modern Canada. We need a new day to do nothing together.

One of those moments

I'm listening to Barack Obama right now, speaking in Philadelphia on the subject of race. 

The speech is up on Chicago Public Radio, the hometown station giving voice to its favourite son. 

A delicate dance here. It's hard to smooth over the incendiary words of a powerful preacher in full flight. I bet a lot of people in the Democratic base probably agree with what the pastor has to say too. Obama has to distance himself from the flame-throwing without tossing over the church he's belonged to for 20 years.

He's trying for sure. Actually, he's doing a pretty good job, all things considered. Some truth-telling going on about the myriad small ways race works in the American psyche, and the big ways that race still haunts the country. A history lesson, an attempt at contextualizing, re-framing the discussion. 

One line jumped out at me.

"The most segregated hour in America is between 11:00 and 12:00 on Sunday mornings."

Quade and I saw that last year.

We were on day-three of our drive back from Mexico and spent a day in Memphis. On the Sunday morning we planned to take in a service at a Baptist mega-church off the interstate. We were staying in a Days Inn, the free breakfasts and pet-friendly policy were big draws. When we got to the "dining room" such as it was, there was a church service in full swing in the adjoining banquet room. It was a black service. The music was great, a palpable buzz coming through the walls. A preacher was on our side of the door getting prepared to deliver his sermon. Impeccably dressed, dignified, clearly focused. 

We finished eating, loaded up the car and hit the road. 

When we got to the church we were greeted by traffic marshals directing traffic in an emormous parking lot, comparable to a good sized mall. 

The church building was equally impressive: modern, clean, sprawling. From outside it didn't exactly code "church" in the classical way, but it did project wealth and a certain piety. Inside it overwhelmed. High ceilings, wide staircases, signs directing you to the church itself, meeting rooms, the bookstore, the restaurant. 

The church itself was like a high-end theatre. It seated about 5,000 and was about two-thirds full on a mid-July Sunday. The seats were large and comfortable, the sightlines excellent from anywhere. If you wanted a close up of the pastor, two jumbotrons duly provided. There was a baptismal pool located above the choir and altar at the back of the sanctuary. When we came in, some new congregants were being dunked whole-body into membership, again, visible on the big-screen.

For a high-Anglican like me, the morning unfolded in a decidedly casual way, one of the attractions, I suspect, of these sorts of places. The church had its own airs for sure; the attire of the front-row parishioners, the well-thumbed Bibles with weekly sermon notes. But on balance, it was a pretty open place. It was also overwhelmingly white.

The choir was excellent, smoothly moving from old-time stemwinder hymns to more contemporary Christian sounds. 

Then there was the sermon.

The preacher was a middle-aged white guy, a former football player at the University of Arkansas, as he reminded us a few times. His subject was "Spiritual Warfare" and his main source was, of course, that paragon of tolerance, Paul. The essence of his message this day is that Christians of his flavour have to battle for souls against those who would snatch them first. There were segues into football imagery, Biblical stories, current events, a riff on anti-Christian imagery in Harry Potter. A nice package, compellingly delivered. But about two-thirds the way through, he lost us.

"I do not believe there is such thing as a homosexual," he said. 

He went on to talk about how gays choose their lifestyle and that choice can be reversed. He talked about the threat it posed. Threat to what? 

One of the undercurrents of the sermon was victimhood, the idea that Christians are in a battle to hold ground against their enemies. They are not the majority culture, but somehow oppressed. It is a common refrain among evangelical Christians. The sky is falling, head to the ramparts! The "gays aren't gay" passage drove that home for me. It is a preposterous position, but has enormous emotional power in a hermetically sealed community of the like-minded. 

When it was over, another hymn and then a few more announcements. The pastor prayed for a parish group that was doing missionary work and community building in Africa. I don't know what sort of evangelizing they are doing, but it is clear they are doing aid work of some sort. A living faith. 

When we left the service and made our way back to the car, we talked about what we'd seen and heard and were both struck by the extremes. The hard moral core, the intolerance of genetic difference, the monochromatic congregation. Also the good works. I was prepared to be appalled by what I saw, but I wasn't. It was a caring community that clearly looked after the souls who committed to it, and was prepared to look after those who had not. It also needed a strong dose of tolerance in areas where misunderstood theology works hand-in-hand with fear of difference.  Like all of us, it is a work in progress. 

I guess the point here is a version of the one Obama was making today. You can take the U-Tube moment and run with it, or you can attempt to view a place in its fuller context. I'm grateful for having gone to the service, I learned a lot about that part of America, I got a better picture. I still think they're wrong on some things, but there are a lot of good people in there.

I understood what Obama was trying to do today, it is a nuanced argument. Let's see if there is room for nuance in this electoral cycle. 

St. Patrick's Day

Eleven years ago today, my father died. 

It was right about now, shortly after 6 p.m. in a hospital in Kingston, Ontario. The weather was even a bit like today; late winter chill, clear day, snow still on the ground.

Dad had cancer. Who knows where it started, by the time it was diagnosed, he was a dead man. It was in his stomach, colon and bowel. There was no medical miracle waiting for him. It was a little over three months from diagnosis to death. 

He did not go happily. The night he got the news, he was angry. He'd gone into an exploratory surgery to try to deal with a mass that had been detected on an ultrasound. He expected he would lose part of his stomach. Instead, the doctors saw cancer everywhere and just closed him up and then gave him the news. 

By the time I was allowed to see him, he was propped up on his bed, in his hospital greens, disheveled and mildly disoriented from the general anaesthetic. He was on the phone with his mother in Victoria.

"No, mother, I am going to starve to death," I heard him snap as I came in. 

I don't really remember much of that evening. He went home with his partner. I must have stayed over, I was living in Toronto at the time. So I guess I must have driven them back. I do remember him over the next few days, sitting in his Lazy Boy, staring out the window of his living room, saying little. 

His last months were busy. He got married (again), this time to his high-school sweetheart. I was his best man. The ceremony took place against the backdrop of the biggest snowstorm in Victoria's history. I hardly saw him, marooned as I was at a cousin's place. 

He got back to Kingston, re-wrote his will, began to get his finances in order, returned to work for a valedictory spin, made amends with some people. 

Then a week before he died, he decided he wanted to live a little longer. He asked his oncologist for chemo. He hadn't had any treatment at all save palliatives: morphine, some stomach meds. The Wednesday before he died, he went in for a dose. I drove up from Brockville to say hi and he was in bed feeling pretty bad. We managed a few words, but I spent most of the time with my stepmother drinking tea and talking about the cat they'd bought. 

That weekend, my girlfriend and I were supposed to fly to Cuba. I drove down again the day before we were supposed to fly, and he was out of it. I decided I couldn't go. I came down the next day, a Sunday, and we took him into the hospital, a two-car convoy to Hotel Dieu. We got him into the emergency triage. He nearly died there. I remember him thanking me for all my help, one of the last lucid moments I remember. We got him into a private room in the early evening and the doctors said he was stable. 

That night I called my mother and told her to tell my brother and sister to get here asap. 

I drove back up the next day; a Monday just like this, a sunny day just like this, a cool day just like this. 

In the morning a man from the Palliative Care department came by to offer his services, later the oncologist paid a visit. He said something, vaguely along the lines of "well, that didn't work, did it?" 

At one point I ducked into the bathroom and I heard Dad bark.

"Davy, bring that bag of cement over here!"

He knew I was there, but where "there" was was not a hospital room.

Around 5 p.m. he was laying on his side, looking out over Kingston harbour and out into Lake Ontario. He rolled over onto his back and said something.

"I'm going out to sea."

About 5:45 an orderly came in and took a look at dad. 

"He needs to get cleaned up, he's looking pretty scruffy," he said.

He pulled out a razor and started shaving him. Dad could grow a decent beard between morning shave and dinner, so three days of growth was pretty impressive. 

The orderly was expert. In a few minutes dad was tidied up. He was on his back, breathing shallowly. A nurse took his pulse.

"It's feathery, I can barely feel it," she said. Dad had a DNR, if his heart stopped, it was not going to be re-started. 

A minute or two later, my stepmother slipped out. A minute or two after that, I looked over at my father and I could see he was gone. 

Winter and all that

I just got back from my home near Brockville. It's a great place on the St. Lawrence River. It's also buried in snow. 

You don't get a lot for your taxes in the rural township where my house is. One thing you do get, however, is decent snow clearance. The plows and sanders seem to hit the road while a storm is underway and once it's done the heavy gear comes out to finish the job. 

I've never seen this much snow there this late in the season. The 7:30 p.m. sunsets make it all the more disorienting. This is light I would see in late-September. The sun is so high and warm now that all it takes is exposing the concrete or wood or granite and the natural heat does the rest, the snow just melts away. For all the perceived permanence of the white blanket, shovel away a bit and your realize pretty quickly, the snow is the interloper here. The sun is the truth-teller.  

Still, the conditions are confusing. Take the waterbirds. The Canada geese are arriving back after the winter down south. In these parts they are accustomed to open water and nice shallows to feed in. But there is still a lot of ice in the river, the northern ducks: old squaw, mergansers and the like, are still here. So is the bald eagle. I saw one confused flock do circles around its usual landing spot and head for open water. This morning a group of about 20 geese were working the shore by my place, navigating through chunks of ice. We'll see if they suffer for lack of food.

The other thing I noticed was my neighbour. George has a dock that is cantilevered out over the fast moving water. It looks like a helipad. It's a vulnerable place. This time of year, ice starts heading down the river and water levels begin to rise. I remember high-water years as a kid, seeing docks torn from their moorings gliding toward Montreal. George has been lucky over the years. Spring water levels have been low, ice has mostly melted before it gets to us. He's lost the odd plank, never anything more serious. This year might be a sterner test for the dock's construction. Yesterday he was down on the dock, looking over the edge, looking west toward the wider part of the river where it's frozen from shore to shore. The Seaway opens in a couple of week and the ice breakers will have to open things up first. The ice will arrive soon, and the high water won't be far behind.

When I pulled out this morning it was snowing lightly. About two inches of new powder was on the ground. It felt like February and looked like it too. The snow let up shortly after Kingston and soon the sky was mostly clear. The sun was on my left shoulder and I was warming up quite nicely. The sun was telling the truth.

The misery of others

It's still winter. I still am bundled up like a walking sleeping bag. We got a foot of snow yesterday and there is no immediate sign of its disappearance.

In this weather I wear my black Man U toque, a gift from my sister when she lived in the UK some years ago. On Saturday morning I was in the Starbucks across the street from work when the barista asked me if I wanted to know the score.

"They lost to Pompey?" I asked.

"1-0, a penalty. They dominated the entire game, hit the post, had the ball cleared off the line, but they lost," he told me.

"Well, all there is to hope for now is for Chelsea to the lose," I told him.

United crashed out of the FA Cup Saturday morning losing 1-0 to Portsmouth in the quarter finals. I couldn't see the game, but checked the result online and read the game summary. Pretty much as my coffee slinger described. As I settled into my chair and got ready for my 12-hour shift, I gradually got over my feelings of shock and dismay and remembered that my team is second in the Premiership and doing well in the Champion's League. Yeah, this isn't 1999 all over again, but it's a good year in the making. And there was the Chelsea tie to look forward to.

One of the essential realities of fandom is that there is going to be another team that you hate almost as much as you love the one you cheer for. In football, that used to be Arsenal because it was the only other team that gave United much trouble. Now that team is Chelsea. The Russian-made mini-dynasty is tribute to the power of money in modern sport and at times the side can actually be a pleasure to watch, but that is the exception. Its steady rise to domination is a tribute to the tactical wisdom of Jose Mourino. He knows how to neutralize another side and played his pieces on the field accordingly. The New Jersey Devils of soccer. Successful but without style. Now the Chosen One is gone, and the team has lost some of its grinding swagger. 

Saturday afternoon it was away to Barnsley, a side in a lower division and a prohibitive underdog. As the game wore on I'd check the BBC Sport(s) site for the score and was stunned to see that the home side had scored. From then on I was clicking back about every five minutes for updates. Low and behold the minnow ate the whale! 

My morning misery was gone in a flash. Yeah, my team lost. At least it was to another Premiership side. Chelsea? Gonged by a Championship team in danger of relegation to League One. They don't make upsets much bigger than that. 

My partner asks me from time to time why I take so much pleasure from seeing my sporting enemies stumble: Chelsea, the Ottawa Senators, Dallas Cowboys, others come along as needs be. My answer does not satisfy her. I want my team to win. The odds of my team always winning are about zero. I don't want my biggest rivals to win. They all face the same odds of perpetual victory, but will occasionally grab the brass ring. That hurts. It's a fundamental injustice. Those victories are never deserved, just as mine are the product of brilliance and imagination.

Even more confusing for the uninitiated is the hierarchy of sports hatred. The further away you get from real rivalry or perceived usurper status, the easier it is to accept defeat or be gracious in the success of others. Arsenal? A stylish, attractive side that has done wonders for English football. I hope they do well, though not too well. The Montreal Canadiens? It's important for pro hockey for the Habs to do well. Montreal is a fantastic hockey town and two decades of relative mediocrity has served to humble the Habs Nation. They don't go around acting like they own the Stanley Cup anymore. Plus, they aren't the Senators. 

I suspect that there are people who will never understand this instinct. But it comes from a primal place. Seeing the mighty fail or my enemy's enemy vanquished are both satisfying. Think about the New York Football Giants. Didn't that upset feel good? And didn't it feel good to see the New England Geniuses laid low by people just as smart as them? And when your team loses to an arch enemy, doesn't it feel good to see that side kayoed in the next round? Yup. 

I'm not above these base feelings if they can soothe my failures, make me feel better about my fan choices, and give me faith that next time, my team will be perfect. 

Go figure

One of the pleasures of being here in Toronto is the Leafs. A pleasure in the sense of the constant attention paid to the team's failures. Success is celebrated but never believed. Failure, the outcome of the last forty seasons, is wallowed in, embraced with gusto, a kind of imagination, even entitlement that once seemed the monopoly of Red Sox fans (and now happily worn by Cubs supporters). While we don't have our Buckner moment (although game six against the Kings in 1993 comes close), we have something even better: living memory of domination uncontaminated by recent success.  Good enough to tease at times, never good enough to dominate for real.

Tonight Canada's Team is in Boston to play the Bruins. We're just over half-way through the second period and the Leafs are up 5-1. That should be a safe lead, but I know that I am not convinced and I am sure that there are thousands of people tuned into the same telecast who feel exactly the same way. 

UPDATE:

Needn't have worried. The game finished 8-2 for Toronto. The Bostons looked pathetic. Now we can look forward to the next round of playoff math handwringing. 

Well this should be interesting

My brother does it. 

My partner does it.

My friends do it.

Why not me?

A former boss of mine was once asked why he didn't write a regular column while he was publisher of the daily newspaper I was editing. He answered that he was "pretty vain about his writing and wanted to have something to say."

That answer stuck with me. I've had a column before and I was the same way. I wrote when I felt I had something to say. Since I was the editor, there were some weeks I could cancel myself. Sometimes opinions are scarce. Inventing one for the sake of 18 inches of copy didn't move me. 

The process of tucking away ideas or pulling research together gave me a deep appreciation for the people who actually write daily for a living. To actually have 800 words worth of something to say every day is bloody hard. To have that much to say just once a week is plenty. A good daily columnist is worth his/her weight in gold and I can see why the good ones make a good living at it. This is a very special skill, one I do not possess.

Opinion is cheap these days. Broadcast, especially cable TV, is full of it. Same for talk radio. This medium at least has the advantage of being unabashed in its opinionated pretensions, and for that reason alone it is worthy of embracing. 

As another former boss used to say...onward!