Playing Hockey on Crang’s Pond
We dreamed of playing at the
Maple Leaf Gardens,
waited for Hockey Night in
Canada following
The Plouffe Family and
Don Messer’s Jubilee,
waited for the Ford to drive
into the gas station
to the chorus of the Esso anthem:
What a great, great feeling,
what a wonderful sense
of pure enjoyment and
of confidence...
Sometime at the end of the fifties
the place to play hockey was
at Crang’s Pond.
We played with the Wolf brothers,
Upton and Ritch
tightening skates on the
frozen banks
striding onto the ice, clearing
the rink
and choosing sides.
Each game was different:
the swerves, the dekes,
glides, passing
and shooting
—to break through the defense
the breakaway...bearing down
on the goalie
(the way I saw Beliveau or
Mahovlich move)
aiming for a corner by the
boot post
into the snow net.
After the breathy exhaustion of the
sudden death goal
we left our indecipherable
signatures on the dark ice.
We always tried to prolong the
hockey season
despite the water lapping the reedy
pond’s edge.
It was so warm I took off my coat
and gloves
and the ice split not far from us,
getting softer, turning a little gold.
Taking off our coats and gloves
we played the game into the warm
afternoon until
the whole damned pond sagged and
cracked beneath us.
Laurence Hutchman grew up in Emery and attended Gulfstream Public School and Emery Collegiate Institute. He received his PhD at the Université de Montreal in 1988. He has taught at a number of universities including Concordia University, the University of Alberta, The University of Western Ontario, and The Université de Moncton where he was a professor for 23 years.
Hutchman has published eight books of poetry, co-edited Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada, and edited a book of interviews In the Writers’ Words: Conversations with Eight Canadian Poets.
He has received numerous grants and won awards including the WFNB’s prize for individual poems and in 2007 he received the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence.
He has served as Quebec Representative and New Brunswick/ PEI for the League of Canadian Poets and as President of the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick. Hutchman has had many readings and conducted numerous workshops in Canada, the United States, China, Ireland and Bulgaria. He lives with his partner, the painter Eva Kolacz in Oakville.