The boy grew up in a simpler time, when he and his friends played baseball in the summer until the street lights came on, football in the fall until the ground became too frozen to kick a tee in the dirt, and hockey in winter when the ice on the small seminary pond was safe.
He wasn’t big on hockey, probably because his father had not played. But he had a pair of skates, a stick that he taped with black cloth electrical tape, and a puck. He also had an old radio with a backlit dial and slide rule tuning. The radio sat on a table near his bed.
The boy listened to the Boston Bruins, not so much because he was a fan but because it was a game, at night, on the radio, from Boston Garden, a place 28 miles from his home that he had heard of but had never been to. The Bruins weren’t very good in those days before a teenager named Bobby Orr arrived in town and changed the way the game is played. But he listened anyway.
One December, when the boy was about 10, he decided he wanted a tabletop hockey game for Christmas. The kind with Bruins and Canadiens on rods that slid up and back beneath the “ice” and twirled so the players could handle the wooden puck and shoot, and with levers to move the goalies left and right in front of the net. The kind with a battery-operated scoreboard and game clock suspended over center ice just like the one in photos of Boston Garden. The kind of tabletop hockey game that he must have seen on television and surely cost a lot of money.
He knew it was a stretch to ask for such a gift. He lived in a housing project, he had little brothers and sisters, and money was always tight. But every year his parents did their best at Christmas. That year was no different. On Christmas morning, well before dawn, he and his siblings bounced downstairs to the den and saw gifts from Santa wrapped and piled beneath the tree. They went to work tearing the paper of a tow truck and a dump truck. Sets of little green army men and gray crusaders. Dolls and stuffed animals. Boxing gloves and football uniforms. Cap guns and holsters. Lincoln logs and an erector set. Great gifts, every one of them, even pajamas, but no tabletop hockey game.
The boy tried to hide his disappointment. After all, he was the oldest and should have known you don’t always get what you ask for. He helped collect Christmas wrap and bows from the floor and was about to take them outside to the trash when the boy’s father asked him to get a pair of pliers from the basement. He opened the door and stopped. Did not move. Stared in disbelief. There it was. The official NHL tabletop hockey game.
More than a half-century later, I can still see that box leaning against the wall at the top of the cellar stairs, feel the rods twisting in my fingertips after I had assembled the game, and hear the mechanical clock ticking the seconds away. A grandfather now, I can recall the joy of receiving the best present of my childhood as if it were today.
Merry Christmas!