Quote of the Day (Russell Banks, on Boyhood Hockey’s Enduring Emotional Significance)

“[F]or a child raised in the northeastern United States and southern Canadian provinces, hockey and ice skating in general are of surprising emotional significance, combining as they do, so early and for so long, social and private experience. Also, they provide an arena in which other people and an intense physical environment are positioned precisely to confront one's young and relatively untested, unknown body. As evidence of the staying power the experience holds, this past winter I've walked down to the pond in the meadow in front of my house perhaps as many as eight or nine times, where, lacing on my skates, pushing off, gliding in slow, rhythmic ovals around the pond, alone and out of sight of the house, my mind backtracks in time, until, before I am aware of it, my physical responses (to the glassy smoothness of the ice, a slight pinch of the toe in the left skate, ears, nose, and chin crystallizing in the breeze caused by my body's  swift movement through still, cold air). and the loose flow of my fantasies (of suddenly breaking free of a tie-up at the boards, he's got the puck, he's going all the way in, the goaltender's ready for him…and whap! a slapper, and the goaltender goes down to his right for the puck, too late, and HE SCORES! glides humbly, suddenly relaxed, past the net, shakes loose clumps of ice shavings from his skate blades, moves like a gentle bear down the ice toward his own goal and his jubilant teammates…), at times like that, when I'm skating alone, my physical responses and my fantasies are coming straight out of childhood.”—American fiction writer Russell Banks, “Defenseman,” in The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (2000)