When It Comes to the Bruins, Husband on Thin Ice
/The Boston Herald
Normally, he is like Henry Higgins: an "ordinary man, even-tempered and good-natured whom you'd never hear complain, who has the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein." But let the Bruins in his life …
And my husband becomes a wild man. Here's a guy who is generally unflappable. We miss a plane to Lincoln, Nebraska because someone read his ticket wrong and he actually says, "Hey. What's the big deal? We'll fly to Omaha and rent a car. It'll be an adventure." And it is, driving all night to where we could have been hours before.
I borrow his beloved, undented, shiny new car and back it into a tree. And he sighs and shakes his head and mutters, "Just once I wish I could wreck my own car, you know?" But he never gets mad.
He goes into a hospital for a test and is told that he has to have immediate open-heart surgery, and he doesn't hyperventilate or panic or weep. He makes jokes. He tells everyone that his tolerance for pain is having his hair cut and that they'd better be gentle with him. He is easy going.
Except when he's watching the Bruins.
It started with a string of words that can't be repeated. He turned them into a litany accentuated by his pounding on the coffee table, crossing and uncrossing his legs, stomping his feet and sighing.
I left the room minutes into the first period. He didn't even know I was gone.
This is normal Bruins-watching behavior. I knew about this flaw before we were married, but it wasn't so pronounced then. The Bruins won all the time. Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito and Derek Sanderson could do no wrong. "Watch this," he would say every two seconds as I sat beside him on his mother's couch. "Look at him skate! Look at that move! That's it. That's it! He shoots! HE SCORES!”
The Bruins were playing Montreal the night our first child decided to be born. I don't remember the score. I wasn't watching the game. But my husband was
"Please can we go to the hospital?" I begged.
"After this play," he said.
"I don't think I can wait," I told him.
"You have to wait. This is a power play.”
After the power play, it was, "There's only five minutes left in this period." And after this it was, "There's only one period left."
He waited until the end of the game, which wasn't even a play-off, which was just an ordinary, early in the season game. "Montreal is never just an ordinary game," he maintains even now.
After our son was born, he appeared in my hospital room bearing - not a bouquet of flowers for the new mother like all the other fathers - but a hockey stick personally signed by all the Bruins.
It was supposed to hang in our son's room, next to his crib. But it didn't. My husband hung it in our room, near his autographed picture of Bobby Orr, until our son got old enough to take it down and claim it as his own.
Which brings us back to Monday night. The Bruins lost and Henry Higgins turned into Mr. Hyde and remained Mr. Hyde all the next day. So did my son who not only inherited a signed hockey stick but the predisposition to curse and scream at hockey games just like his father.
I'm glad the season's over. The Red Sox get him only moderately nuts.
