By Jack Armstrong
Last winter, contrary to my generally prudent nature, I had sort of resolved to unpack my old hockey skates, still in their box from our move a couple of years earlier, and get out on the ice.

This created some anxiety for a number of reasons, the most salient being the fact that I didn’t really know whether I could remain vertical on those thin blades after so many years of successfully ignoring their allure. This was not always the case. For a brief period of time in the late ’60s, I was a genuine puckhead.

I was 16 when the National Hockey League came to Minnesota in 1967, and my best friend and I embraced the sport with as much vigor as two teens can muster. There were many reasons for this, not all of them related to the elegant mix of grace and brutality that characterized the sport.

Nearly every night after supper, we’d slap on our breezers and pads, grab our sticks and walk down to the rink four blocks away, where we would lace up our skates and chase the puck around the rink, along with whoever happened to show up that night. Sometimes, we’d have nine or 10 or more players of various ages and expertise crowding the ice on either team, creating a divine sort of anarchy — avoiding the little kids, crashing into our peers, and always keeping the puck on the ice (athletic cups were not part of our uniforms; besides, we were immortal).

The warming house was always populated by our neighborhood’s more adventurous girls, Marlboro-puffing vixens who inhabited a world far more mysterious than any hockey fantasies my sports-obsessed friends and I could conjure. It all made for some magical winter nights.

I played a couple years of park-and-rec hockey while in high school and one particularly embarrassing intramural league game at Williams Arena at the U of M. (I’d neglected to sharpen my skates, and spent my dwindling shifts sliding around as if I were wearing boots while clumsily deflecting pucks into our own net.) I pretty much gave up the sport in my mid-20s. I continued to love skating, though, and The Missus still speaks of the time in the late 1970s when, at a skating party with a gaggle of local bon vivants, I cast wild aspersions on my carefully constructed literary-revolutionary identity by casually carving figure eights on Lake of the Isles — while skating backwards.

But, I’ve been out on the ice only a handful of times in the past 10 years, so when, on a crisp Saturday afternoon, I finally dragged the old skates from their shelf in the garage and drove over to Lake Nokomis, I really didn’t know what to expect. The parking meter demanded 50 cents an hour, which gave me pause; who knows how long I’d manage to stay upright on the ice. After some consideration, I threw in a couple of quarters and headed toward the lake. I sat down on the wooden steps leading down to the shore (the warming house, of course, was closed — budget cuts) and began to lace up my skates, only vaguely aware of the potential for disaster inherent in this particular endeavor. The rink was completely vacant and dusk was looming. I’m not a fatalist, but it didn’t take much creativity to imagine an early-morning skater or ice angler discovering my frozen body splayed on the frigid surface, head neatly framed by a darkening pool of blood.

Still, part of me was thankful that there was no one else on the ice to watch me totter about, propelling myself speculatively — prospecting for some sense of balance. Should I lean forward? Crouch more? And what do I do with my arms? For a while, I felt like a toddler taking his first steps.

But, after a couple of turns around the rink’s big oval, I was starting to get the hang of it again: leaning and pushing, leaning and pushing, arms swinging, body swaying, and blades skimming along — frictionless against the frozen track. I was working up a bit of a lather after a few minutes; a healthy breeze greeted me after each half-circuit, forcing me to push through the oval’s home stretch. It felt good, though. Despite the rough ice, the wind and a rapidly forming blister on the outside of my right ankle, I was actually enjoying myself.

At some point, I looked up and marveled at the pink sunset on the west side of the lake. Then, coming out of the second turn, wind at my back, I was suddenly confronted with a glorious full moon hovering just above the eastern horizon. When I told the Missus about it later, she said the moon was at perigee — its closest encounter with our planet during its monthly tour, which makes it appear larger. It’s a rarity when it happens at its fullest phase, and so this was the biggest full moon of 2009.

I’m not accustomed to these sorts of magical moments. I could’ve just as easily caught a blade in a rut and tumbled face-first onto the merciless ice. Or turned an ankle. Or skidded over a bump and torn open my kneecap. (At my age, you think about these things.). But, no — here I was, gliding around this oval in nearly perfect silence beneath the luminous moon feeling like I was, oh, maybe 45 again.

So, I coasted over to where I’d left my boots and, with more effort than you’d expect from a 45-year-old, sat down and pulled off my skates, checked my new blister and slid on my boots, welcoming their offer of stability.

I was recalling those long-ago boot-clad treks home from the rink during my last infatuation with the ice, skates hanging from my hockey stick, when I came upon a Park Police car that was just exiting the parking lot. No ticket on the rusting Oldsmobile. Hmmm. The half-buck I had reluctantly surrendered for an hour-long slot on the blacktop turned out to be a smart move. Magic.

This essay is from the winter issue of MOQ, most of which is available only in print. To learn what else is in this issue, please go to this page. For information on how to get a copy of MOQ, please click over to here.