The 6th in our 118-part series.
It being Fathers’ Day, IPB would like to take a moment to pile on the schmaltz while examining one of the reasons we love hockey. Our father passed away 14 years ago, and was not much of a sports fan himself, so we can’t pull out that old trope of baseball writers everywhere and wax poetic about drowsy summer afternoons spent playing catch with the old man. But we can instead sing the praises of hockey and how it is…
The Backdrop For Our Friendship As Adults With Our Mother.
We were both teenagers when our father died, and although we had always been close with our mother, what we discovered in the months following the loss of our dad was that we were in uncharted water with Boomer, who was then just “Mom”. We found out that, beyond being the provider of maternal nurturing we had always known and loved, she was also an actual human being. A human being with the same sense of humor we had, the same interests we had, the same irreverent, giggly, silly approach to life we had. She was, in short, cool. And how did we find this out? Through our shared discovery of and immediate obsession with hockey.
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