Coco and I went to the pond.
Coco is our dog. She is a chocolate lab. She is usually up for a trip to Grenadier Pond in High Park.
I had spent most of the afternoon wrapping Christmas presents on the dining room table. I came up with this idea that I would use poster paint to decorate newsprint as Christmas wrapping. You could call this cheap, or ghetto, and, yes, it is both, but I bet, too that I could have a big hit at the One of a Kind Show if I sold Christmas wrapping paper with motifs of snowmen, Christmas trees and snowflakes and red stars painted with poster paint on newsprint. Newsprint is so rare these days that I bet it has a cachet of cool.
Anyway, we went to the pond. I gambled that the pond would be frozen thick enough to skate on it.
In 23 years of living in Toronto I have never missed a season of skating on Grenadier Pond.
After all that wrapping I was just a bit stir-crazy. Plus it’s been plenty cold lately so I made a judgement call that the pond was frozen.
I put the dog, a snow shovel and my skates in the back of our old Ford Focus wagon.
We drove to the park and walked past all the kids and their parents shouting in Hungarian (a guess) as they sledded down the big hill that connects the Grenadier Restaurant to Grenadier Pond.
I got to the pond and left my skates on the bank and Coco and I walked out onto the ice, covered in a layer of powdery snow. I shoveled off a sort of oval of sorts and as I came back to the bank I saw a tall couple show up. They each carried hockey skates. He carried two hockey sticks.
“How is the ice?” they asked.
“It’s very smooth,” I said.
I laced up and skated off. I discovered that, while it was fun to shovel off a path with the shovel, it was actually more fun to just skate all 2 km of the pond just skating through the layer of snow. The ice below was as smooth as glass. Coco and I flew across the ice.
I got back to where I’d started. The man had laced up. “My name’s Ryan,” by the way, said Ryan.
“And I’m Katrina,” said Katrina, who boasted remarkably pearly white, straight teeth. She might as well have been a TV star. Maybe she is.
Anyway, Ryan turns out to be from Markham, and she’s from Vancouver. He’s a great skater and she’s a beginner.
Ryan put a puck on the ice. Coco stole it.
“I’ll never get it back for you,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Oh well,” said Ryan. “I have another one.”
Ryan turned to Coco.
“Merry Christmas,” he said.