My Night with Toula

Men and women play organized recreational ice hockey for different reasons, primarily because they love the game. Secondly, I believe it is like joining fraternal orders in the past. The Moose, Masons, Elks and so on. Men love women but occasionally need to fraternize with other men. I suspect it is similar for women too.
For me, I would much rather play pick up/shinny/rat hockey than play on a team. More often than not, a team will have over ten guys and at thirteen to fifteen guys, it is more sitting than playing. The hurry-up-I- wanna-get-home attitude of many referees who refuse to blow icing or let just about anything short of decapitation take place so that they don’t have to blow their whistle, puts me more on edge than I need be. Be all that as it may, invitations come up periodically to fill in for absent paid players and I usually answer the call.
A team of police officers needed a fill in one night and so I opted to grab my gear and head over to the local rink after all the youth teams had skated, some time before midnight on a week night. I can’t tell you if we won or lost. Most games are pretty unremarkable for the most part unless one scores a hat trick, gets hurt or has a good fight. None of the above occurred for me.
The cops held court at a particular bar after games and so I accompanied them for the proverbial “one”. I surmised that men primarily join teams more for the fraternity than for calorie burning. Buckets of beer flowed for over an hour. The average was about a six pack per player. At 150 calories per bottle, that is about 900 calories of liquid and that does not include the nachos with cheese, chili and sour cream. I had a good time listening to tales of drunk driving, stopping strippers from a local strip club, wife beaters, bank robbers, speeders, thieves and so on. These men day in and day out see the worst of the worst among us. I mixed glasses of Merlot with Sangria so that each was not too bitter or too sweet. After about an hour, one of each drink arrived at the table compliments of a smiling woman with a pool cue in her hand. She smiled at me and lifted her eyebrows. The cops all kidded me and I rolled with it. Had the woman been beautiful, there would have been no kidding but I was being pursued by a woman twice my size. I politely raised both glasses to her from across the room as a gesture of gratitude. After almost two hours of the lively art of conversation, I decided it was time to leave before I couldn’t leave as I was nearly drunk at that point. I may have been already drunk come to think of it.
As I walked towards my car, a black Trans-Am circa 1984, rumbled towards me. The tinted window dropped and inside was my plus sized suitor. She asked if I wanted to go for a ride. I giggled at the invitation. More often than not, it is a man who sends a drink across a bar to a female that has caught his eye and times the departure of the female so that he can offer a ride or a phone number. It was a week day and I was due at work in less than six hours but decided that going for a ride was going to be worth it. There was a better than even chance that I was going to be calling in sick.
We drove to another bar in a blue collar area of the city to have another drink or maybe two or three. We played pool against a couple of men who were dead serious about their pool playing. My date single handedly destroyed them without any help from me. At stake was a round of drinks and we won. On top of the several drinks that I had downed with the cops and several more at the second bar, I had downed well over two thousand calories of liquid and found that when I turned my head, my vision had a two second delay. What I learned and retained about the woman prior to incoherence was that her name was Toula and that she was Greek, never married and in her thirties. She played competitive pool regularly and had a nephew of high school age that played ice hockey. What Toula learned about me was that I played ice hockey, coached ice hockey, owned a few ice hockey pro shops and played music
Upon reaching my car, I had to divulge to Toula that I was unable to drive home. Being a good Greek girl who was not married, Toula lived at home with her parents so going to her house was out of the question. I told Toula that we should just go to my apartment. Toula scanned my apartment to try and gather what I was about by studying my belongings. She saw the poster of Marlon Brando from the 1950’s on a motorcycle, books about philosophy, every book written by Kurt Vonnegut and anthologies by H.L. Mencken, my couch, television and full sized acoustic bass in the dining room all by itself on a stand. There stood my giant violin alone. I do recall Toula asking me to play it. I not only played it, I sang. I did this for probably a few minutes and then I don’t remember anything else.
I woke up some hours later and the sun felt as if it had been up for a good part of the day. I had a good headache going and was dehydrated. I didn’t move at first because it hurt my eyes to blink. I used my peripheral vision to see if I had in fact brought back home the woman who had purchased me a drink. She was lying on her side, facing me with the palm of her hand supporting her head.
“Good morning, sleepy head…”
I had no choice but to acknowledge her presence. I was missing my shirt and could feel cool sheets against my legs but wasn’t sure if I was wearing anything at all. I reached down by hand to confirm that I had at least underwear on and I did. I must have had a confused look on my face about a few things from the night before and so Toula filled in the blanks.
“Um let’s see… You played the bass for me after you took off your shirt and pants. I told you that you looked like Mogli from the Jungle Book and you sang, “I wanna be like you” until I helped you into bed,” said Toula.
I could have excused myself and went to the washroom to examine myself for any hints of sexual activity upon my person during the two minute long morning urination but instead I posed a question with my eyes. Did we consummate the evening? How did it all work? Was I any good? Are you on birth control?
“You wanna know if we did something now, don’t you? Well it wouldn’t be fair to tell you at this point… Why don’t you put on some clothes and we can get breakfast.”
We talked about many different things and I realized that she was really a nice person who was funny and quite easy to talk to. I suspected her size was an impediment to finding any sort of quality male and to me that was sad. Toula was funny and intelligent and had her act together. The only thing she lacked was a physique that would draw men to her. We ate breakfast and I was returned to the place I had parked my car the night before. I hugged Toula and told her I had a great night. She didn’t ask for my number or to see me again. She roared off in her Pontiac and I never saw her again… Until.
After coaching a game one night, I left the locker room after the game and walked through the lobby where the parents were waiting for their boys to shower and go home. I rarely stopped to talk to the parents because accessibility breeds unnecessary problems. I really don’t care to hear what parents think and if you listen to one, others soon chime in.
One of the mothers of one of my players who was really quite attractive, stopped me to introduce me to her sister. I was surprised and stunned to the point of not being able to speak.
“My sister Toula wanted to meet you…”
I shook Toula’s hand. She winked and told me that it was very nice to have met me. All I could say was it was very nice to have met her too.

One game on last night and it was a beauty in Detroit. An overtime win for Detroit over Phoenix that could have gone either way like last year’s playoffs. Lidstrom has nine straight games of at least a point. That sort of effort is what Detroit will need if they want to reclaim the cup. That and Howard will have to come up big at key times. Six goals against will not cut it.