Dear Mike,

It’s fall now. He’s got a new pair of And One Basketball shoes that are half baby blue suede, half white leather. And one size bigger than his last ones. He’s reading The Diary of Anne Frank in L.A. (language arts) and studying integers in Math. He and his friends are trying to plan a trip to Minneapolis in October to see the Vikings. It would be his birthday present. I guess you know he’s turning fourteen at the end of October.

This summer we went to L.A. (Los Angeles) and while we were there O. insisted that we go to Venice Beach. Specifically, to the Venice Beach basketball courts. They’re famous, he told us, movies are shot there, some of the Lakers play there once in a while, we have to go there. We’d be fools not to go there. We can’t not go there. Plus, he said, Jonathan Richman sings about Venice Beach. This summer he started loving the music of Jonathan Richman. When we drove all day through the sequoias to see the big one, general sherman, the biggest living thing in the world, he said he didn’t care, that he’d rather sit in the van and sing along to “I, Jonathan” one more time. So we went to Venice Beach.

At first we strolled along the boardwalk looking at different stuff, eating ice cream, talking, laughing, the usual. Then, suddenly, there were the courts right in front of us. And you could just feel this kind of tension come over O., like the way a dog gets when he sees a cat or a squirrel and just stops and stares and you know something’s going to happen. The happy, easy feeling of strolling along a boardwalk in the sunshine was gone and it felt like we’d just entered another zone or something. And O. says oh man, oh man, there they are. And then suddenly his voice kind of gets lower and his body kind of slumps around the shoulders to indicate that he’s one badass killer dude, unfortunately with an ice cream cone in his hand and with his mom and little sister standing next to him, and he says, in this low voice, uh, I’ll be over there, and jerks his head towards the courts, and starts walking away using the new L.A. killer dude walk that he’s been practicing. Can I have your ice cream, O.? G. yells after him, which at this moment is for him like being shot in the back with an AK-47 but because he’s such a sweet badass dude, he slowly turns around and holds out his cone to her before heading towards the courts.

Naturally, the rest of us can’t follow him. We know this. So we go and sit far away from the courts, on a wooden bench, and we watch. We can barely see him, he’s about an inch tall, but we can see enough to know, sort of, what’s going on. First of all he goes and sits on these bleachers that they have set up between the main court and one of the three other lesser courts. He’s smart enough to know that he’s not going to get to play on the main court. There’s a full game happening there already and these guys are really fucking good, and much older than O. But on the court beside the main one there are some other guys playing three on three and these are the guys O.’s watching. We figure that he thinks he can get to sub in one of these games. But he just sits there, he doesn’t make a move. He’s waiting.

And it’s really hot outside and finally G. says she wants to go to the beach, so C. takes her and I stay on the bench reading and watching O. from time to time. He’s still not moving, not playing, not doing anything but watching from the sidelines. Then C. and G. come back from the beach and C. sits down on the bench to watch, and G. and I go back to the beach. We’re there for a while, splashing around, digging in the sand, collecting seashells. Eventually we go back to the bench to find out what’s going on. Nothing, says C. He’s still sitting there. And I think to myself, he’s not going to do it. Then, suddenly, we see O. get up and walk over to one of the guys playing three on three. He’s saying something and the other guy says something, and then O. goes back and sits down. Shit! I say, they’re not going to let him play. But O. doesn’t leave the bleachers. He just sits there. The only difference is that now he’s taken off his baseball cap.

Behind us is the spot where those guys lift weights and swing from metal hoops and stuff, Muscle Beach, and C. and G. and I turn to watch these guys for a few minutes. Then we turn back to look at O. and right then, he makes his move. He gets up off the bleachers, walks over to the same guy as before, they say a few things, and then the guy sits back down where O. was and O. starts to play! He’s playing. He’s playing basketball at the Venice Beach Basketball Courts in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. His dream has come true.

And then he plays for what seems like forever, he plays for at least three hours, while the rest of us watch him in between doing beach things, totally in awe of the kid’s nerve and patience. He looks good out there on the court too, he’s younger but he’s just as good as some of the guys he’s playing with, and better than a few too. He’s the only white guy and he’s so white and with his shirt off and his long, skinny torso darting in and out, moving around, he looks like a ghost or a flash of lightning or something. Afterwards I offered to take a picture of him in front of the Venice Beach Courts sign and he said oh god, mom, no. Then G. asked him why he waited so long to ask the guy if he could play, what was he waiting for, Christmas? I don’t know, he said, smiling through all his sweat and whacking her over the head with his T-shirt, yeah, whatever. We kept walking, all of us silent as though we had just witnessed a miracle, and then O., forgetting that he was the top shit brother of the Boyz of Venice Beach, kind of arched his back, put his arms up in the air, sank to his knees right there on the asphalt and said oh man, this is the best day of my life!

See you in the photos, Mike.

X.

Dear Tiger Woods,

How are you? I hope that you are in good health.
I am fine. I am writing this letter to you in reference to the letter that I wrote to Barbara Walters in reference to The May 21, 1997 TV interview with you.

Included in this letter is a copy of The May 25, 1997 letter.

In The May 25, 1997 letter that I wrote to Barbara Walters I mentioned Ebony Magazine.
Since I mentioned Ebony Magazine I thought that I would write a letter to The Publisher of Ebony Magazine.

Dear Tiger, on the same day, May 25, 1997 * I wrote a letter to The Sports Editor of The New York Daily News.
The May 25, 1997 letter that I wrote to The New York Daily News is all about you, Tiger Woods.
So included in this letter is a copy of The May 25, 1997 letter that I wrote to The Daily News.
I hope that you find it to be easy reading.

Dear Tiger let’s be honest for a moment.
Dear Tiger ever since I wrote that letter to you all I can think about is you.
All I can think about is what it would be like to be with you.
Dear Tiger I was wondering what it would be like to be with you.
Dear Tiger, you are all that I want.
You are all that I need.
Dear Tiger I want to meet you right away.
Dear Tiger I need to meet you right away.
Dear Tiger before I proceed to write to any of the other celebrities, sports announcers, and TV personalities
I would like to meet you so that I can get a field for you so
I will know what it is all about.

So that when I write to these people I will know what I am talking about because
I will have already talked about it with you.
Before I write to anymore sports announcers and TV personalities
I need to talk to you.
I need to talk to you, Tiger.
I want to meet you, Tiger.
I want to meet you, Tiger before I write to anymore sports announcers and TV personalities.

I need to meet you, Tiger before I write to anymore sports announcers and TV personalities about you.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

You know Tiger ever since I wrote that letter to you all I can think about is you.
Tiger, you are all that I want.
Tiger, you are all that I need.
And Tiger I want to meet you right away.
And Tiger I need to meet you right away.
Please make an arrangement for me to meet you right away.

Or at least, send me something to let me know if you care about me
the way that I care about you.
Tiger if you care about me send me something that I can hold on to that will tell me that you care about me.
Or better yet.
Tiger please make an arrangement for me to meet you so that
I can hold on to you.
They say that you are 6’2″.
Well I’m 5’5″.
It would be mighty nice to meet you so that
I can get a field for you so that I will know what I’m doing.

I need to know what it would be like to talk to Tiger Woods.
And walk with Tiger Woods.
I need to know what it would be like to touch Tiger Woods.
Because I really do cherish you
and I want to hold you close to my heart.
I want to meet you right away.
I need to meet you right away.
Please make an arrangement for me to meet you right away.
I look forward to the pleasure of your company.

Respectfully,

C.J.F.
Legal Aid Society Advocate
Association of Bridal Consultants, Inc. Student Member
Graduate of New York Real Estate School
Tiger Woods, Mi Amouro

Dear Paul,

Ten days ago I fell off one of those push scooters on my first run around the block. The scooter was only a day old – I had just given it to my girlfriend for her birthday – and I had been up the hill to the schoolyard and around to the paved alley and a long gliding run home. It was a terrific ride, and at some point I even lost my self-consciousness, which is not easy to do on a scooter, the operation of which requires that one hump along in the manner of a one-legged person trying to run away. (Gracefulness is not implicit in scooting, as it is in, say, skateboarding, although the downhill glide can certainly approach the not-ungraceful.) Then I hit a few crumbs of gravel at the curb and the tiny front wheel jackknifed and threw me over and as I pitched forward onto the sidewalk I remember thinking that I was going to be fifty-three years old next month.

I lay for a moment on my side, staring quietly into the grainy concrete of the sidewalk. I could feel no pain and my glasses were still on my nose, but for a moment I couldn’t move. I got slowly to my feet and then I had the scooter by the handlebars and I was walking carefully along, breathing hard and looking more or less straight ahead. I glanced down and saw that the third finger of my right hand was bent off at a frightening angle at the first knuckle, and before I could think I took hold of it with my other hand and popped it around and back into its socket. (This was an astonishing thing for me to do, and it gives me the willies to write about it now.) Then my left knee began to speak to me in the language of pain and I presumed that I had torn my trouser leg, but it was undamaged, and I remembered wondering a long time ago how it was possible to skin your knee without ripping your pants (a detail impossible to hide from your mother): for this was certainly the hot pain of a skinned knee, a sensation that had been absent from my life for more than forty years. I took a closer look at the finger, and I could see two puncture cuts on the inside along the crease at the first knuckle, from which trickles of blood were running into the palm of my hand. The puncture cuts had gone in at the extremities of an old rectangular scar on the same finger, souvenir of a wound acquired when I was eleven years old and I was taking out the garbage in my running shoes. I was running at the time, which is what you did in running shoes, and when I fell (pitched forward is how I remember it now), the garbage went everywhere and I cut my finger open on the edge of a tin can. My mother got me to the hospital and my father (who was a doctor and could tie a knot with two fingers inside a matchbox) stitched me up with a piece of black thread, which he knotted at the corners of my tiny, perfect trap door of a wound – the exact same spots where these two new punctures had gone in.

The pain in the finger wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be (aspirin, vodka, a noxious liquid called Heet) and over the next few days the swelling went from blue to purple to green and then back to a more acceptable flesh colour, but the puncture wounds hardened up and turned black and then grew into horny protuberances that felt and looked exactly like the knots of black thread with which my father had tied off his stitches so many years ago. As I brushed my thumb over them (repeatedly, compulsively), I could feel myself re-inhabiting the body of an eleven-year-old boy slightly out of breath from being afraid, and now proud of his wound and of the mark it would leave on his body. All week I have been shifting in and out of that other body that I had forgotten for so long, and remembering how as children we learn the limits of the world by surviving accidents, many of which involve falling. I recall high-speed bicycle chases down the long hill into town; swinging along the branches in the big oak tree in a friend’s backyard; dodging the kid at first base and splitting an eyebrow by running into a nearby tree. Somewhere in there a broken wrist, a cast on my right arm. And always the scar tissue on the knees, the band-aids and disinfectant. Wounds were a confirmation in those days, and I discover to my surprise that they still are: I am confirmed in my wounds, and not humiliated.

It happens that I have been studying the history of miracles (looking for Arctic miracles, of which there appear to be very few), and in particular the stigmatics, whose bodies spontaneously develop wounds corresponding to the wounds of Christ on the cross as depicted in painting and sculpture. Stigmatic wounds often go right through hands and feet (in the photographs they look like enormous cigarette burns); some of them even develop hard black points resembling nailheads. Stigmata never appear in the wrists or ankles, which is where the real nails would have gone in, in a real crucifixion, but nevertheless stigmatic wounds are real; they appear where they have been represented to appear in art, in dreams, and perhaps, as in my case, in memory: stigmata at the very least are artifacts of memory, emanations (even proof) of a world that may no longer be this one, but a world, nonetheless: I know now that my childhood is still there, and this knowledge is what has been given to me: yes, the stigmata are gifts from that world to this.

–Stephen

Dear Mike,

More really big news. Last night O.’s school had its sports banquet and awards evening which included dinner and dancing, and O. got THREE trophies which were: the Coaches’ Award for junior boys basketball, which basically means hardest-working and most versatile (he’s a wing, like Vince Carter and Kobe Bryant are wings), M.V.P. for junior boys volleyball, and, get this, Male Athlete of the Year for grade eight. It’s amazing how focused he is when it comes to sports, and when he comes home from school he gives the barking neighbor dog the finger, slams the back door, drops his four-hundred-pound backpack in the middle of the kitchen floor, screams that he’s starving, hurls his socks and shoes around the living room, plays a very loud CD, gets the dog all riled up, then splays himself all over the entire couch reading ESPN magazine, and then when that thrill wears off goes downstairs with a drink he spills on the keyboard to check out Hoopstv.com to have his anti-Canada thing reinforced by reading about Artesia High in California where all the hot high school basketball players have to go to be discovered and where he will never, ever go because he’s stuck in Winnipeg, home of Winnie the Pooh, thanks a lot. Once, a few years ago, G. made a really nice birthday card for him with pictures of him playing different sports and inside it said to my brother the joke. Which was supposed to be jock. She had a problem with spelling certain words when she was little. She used to write things like I rule, you suke. So, anyway, you see? I can’t even explain how wrong it is that you don’t know this stuff, unless of course you’re reading this letter, which you probably aren’t, which makes me wonder why I bother with this exercise. That’s right, tell the void how much your son rocks. Talk to the void.

C. told him how proud he was of him and that he didn’t have to do sports if he didn’t want to, if he wasn’t having fun, and that if he quit all sports today we’d still love him, still be proud of him. And C. told him how great it was that he was controlling his temper in games when he lost, or after a bad call, or whatever, and O. said, I’m just storing it up. And C. said, oh what are you going to do, explode on the court some day, and O. said ooooh nooo, worse than that. And C. said, spit in the ump’s face? And O. said ooooh nooo, way worse than that…okay, he was joking, but it reminded me of when you said you used to lose your temper all the time and then, around twelve or thirteen, after throwing a plate or a bottle of ketchup at your older sister who had taken your ski-doo suit or something, you just went okay, that’s it. I’m not gonna get mad anymore, it doesn’t help me, it makes it worse, I get in trouble, I look like an idiot, and it’s stupid. And then, sure enough, I’m trying to think of one time you got mad, and I can’t. You never got mad, even when I was such a jerk and stuff was happening, you just put on music and cooked meat and smoked cigarettes and what? Remember when I freaked out and drove myself to the hospital to have O. because I thought you were too relaxed about the whole thing, and you ran all the way, all those miles of city blocks to the hospital, and came in all sweating and red and purple and I was already dilated, and the nurse said you looked like John Lennon and you said, I’m here, I’m here, and I said some asshole thing and you said, C’mon, look what’s happening here, this is big, don’t be mad now. All right, that made a lot of sense. But Mike, it’s still big, he’s still here, still happening. So don’t you be mad now.

See, I’m trying to learn more about O. by remembering what I can of you. It’s a little uncanny sometimes how some things are really similar, like this anger thing. Just out of the blue, the kid stops losing his temper at the same age you decided to stop losing your temper. So where does it go, when you stop losing it? Was that what that benign tumour was all about, the one you had removed from your head? Should I be checking O.’s head for tumours because you had one? Were you ever Athlete of the Year? Remember when we just sat around in that empty dive apartment drinking, smoking, listening to music, being young and soooo cool and undernourished, and now we have a kid who’s Athlete of the Year? Is that not the funniest thing? Me in 1983: Oh yeah, someday (cough, cough) I’ll have a kid who’s a real jock (pass me that roach). You in 1983: Yeah, yeah, me too (wheeze)…hahahahahah.

It would be so cool if you’d get back to me, really. I mean not me, him. Or me first, or whatever. Not for some romantic thing, don’t get the wrong idea. C. and me are great, and you’re probably married with other athletic kids. Sometimes I wonder if you just decided that it would be best if you slipped away forever, best for O. and me and that you really, really believed that. Remember when I stood on the sidewalk in front of my house with O. on my hip, he was about two years old, and I screamed my stupid head off at you while you walked away without saying a word? Maybe you were thinking, this is nuts, this poor kid, I’ve gotta go. That would have made sense at the time, right? But, you know, I’ve calmed down since then, even though I was a lot older than thirteen when I figured out that losing my temper wasn’t getting me anywhere.

I’m feeling kind of sentimental for some reason, so one last thing before I go outside to toughen up: why don’t you reconsider? Drop us a line, no questions asked. No swearing, no freaking out, I swear. He’s the grade eight male Athlete of the Year fer fuck sakes.

X. in Winnipeg.

Dear Paul,

The weather is damp and grey here, the waters filled with toxins. Celine Dion is lying prostrate after a turkey-baster insemination; Mamma Mia! is still going strong; and the New Jersey Devils and the Dallas Stars are vying for the Stanley Cup.

The Toronto Maple Leafs, of course, have been out of the playoffs since a humiliating loss, in six games, to the Devils (whose offensive prowess and neutral-zone trap made the Leafs look like Thorazine-addled mental patients).

I was surprised to receive your email after your abrupt departure from Saturday Night, as I never heard from you again after our meeting in February in which I made my fervent plea to interview the Maple Leafs’ goalie, Curtis Joseph. I assumed that by wearing a poncho to our meeting I had offended your unyielding good taste. I imagine that it is homesick amnesia that has prompted you to ask me why I came to see you in the first place, or maybe my request has germinated in some dark, recessive quarter of your mind. At any rate, I am very pleased, in response to your inquiry, to explain this fleur du mal.

The bloom, I am afraid, has gone off the rose that was once my searing ardour for CuJo (his nickname, derived from the eponymous Steven King lunatic dog whose face is reproduced, in the manner of van art, on Joseph’s mask), but I will attempt to remember what it was like when I was an intrepid idolater, hunting Big Game.

It has been years since I first developed an attachment to CuJo, ever since he was photographed arriving, from St. Louis, at Pearson Airport in the summer of 1998, with his blonde wife and three children in tow. On this occasion he made an impertinent remark about the then-Leafs goalie Felix “The Cat” Potvin, something to the effect of “This town isn’t big enough for the both of us.”

Joseph had been acquired for the Bionic sum of six million dollars a year by Leafs President and administrative mastermind Ken Dryden. (I tried to read Dryden’s book The Game this year to prepare to write about goalies, but his training as a lawyer makes his prose tediously argumentative, e.g., “Bowman is tough. Not simple. A tough coach. Tough but fair. It’s not simple, working with Bowman, it’s fair and tough, simply.”) I was just starting to watch hockey in earnest. I fixated on Joseph immediately, with the kind of wary fascination that attends the arrival of any new sheriff in town.

I need to explain, immediately, that any affective relationship with a hockey player is necessarily divided into the binary positions of passion and contempt. (Like the paradox encoded in the Marilyn Manson mantra “love to hate hate to love,” unrequited adoration is both exhilarating and humiliating. A star’s brightness, physicists and the lovelorn maintain, depends on two things: “how much light it radiates” and “how far it is [from you].”)

Although I had been watching hockey, every single Leafs game in fact, I had yet, at this point, to feel a close or urgent link to the game. As a female, in the past, I would always enter a dulling, hierarchic, or traditionally male-dominated sphere (graduate school, literary events, trips to Canadian Tire) by forming an erotic attachment with one of its constituents. (Have you ever gone to a party that is filled with horribly ugly people, and found yourself drawn to the least repellent woman there, seeing her, in this context, as Olympia herself? If so, then you understand my first principle: attachment in context is both tenuous and powerful.)

Hockey players are, for the most part, very young, acneic and stricken with accelerated male pattern balding; their finest assets, their athletic bodies, are concealed by inflated pads and bulky, tasteless costumes. You can imagine my conundrum.

Curtis Joseph, however, is moderately handsome, and approximately my own age: he is, more importantly, possessed of beautiful blue eyes.

I want to pause at this point and restate the paradox and emphasize the precise point of my fixation.

Curtis Joseph the man is a golf-playing, charity-surfing, utterly ordinary married man with a hockey wife named Nancy and children, whose initials are emblazoned in a shamrock on his helmet, that bear these unforgivable names: Madison (the mermaid in Splash), Taylor (the kid on Home Improvement) and Tristen (“Iselte” will no doubt follow). His favourite food, according to the official Maple Leafs website, is “chicken wings.”

CuJo the goalie is, in the position of the team’s protector and great hope, a preternaturally skilled player, one whose athleticism takes the form of variations on the Kama Sutra, and whose eyes, framed by the bars of his cage, are

Skies over great lakes, roiling,

Cezanne cobalt, Van Gogh navy

agate, indigo

submerged shale,

Byron’s eyes that Coleridge described as open portals of the sun

Blue moons, shining on and so on and so on.

Staring in to these eyes courtesy of a CBC crease camera, I felt just like Milos Forman’s Salieri (played by scenery-chewing F. Murray Abraham) enraged into humility by the sight of beauty, unreachable, behind bands of steel.

I remember telling you in your office (after I showed you one of my orisons to CuJo, beginning “O Stalwart! Thy pads are the womanly shields of the Bee, stinging my heart with manly venom”) that desire, it seems to me, is an engine that moves improbable machinery.

A simple analogy would be choosing to live in, say, Calgary, because you have fallen in love with a cowgirl, effectively forsaking all sense and reason.

The improbable machinery, in my case, was my capacity to be a genuine hockey fan: a hard-core, stone-cold, “Whack that fucking Barnaby!” fan whose Saturday nights are spent contemplating, in feverish reverence, a Canadian game.

You told me you didn’t know much about hockey (though I’m sure like most men, you know enough to keep you safely in the small-talk zone, e.g., “I don’t know, Balfour’s looking pretty good”). I must tell you, it’s a lot more complicated than it seems, and in order to want to learn what constitutes icing, offside, or interference, for example; to learn anything beyond pure shop talk (useful in the company of strange if barbarous men), you need a strong motivator.

Growing up male in the same city your whole life is usually enough (and really, this is too boring to explain, but men, generally, are bigger sports fans than women, likely because any one of them, in the putative democracy that is pro sports, could grow up to play in the major leagues). Female sports fans tend to fall into four categories: the actual jock/fan, or player; the Hatpin Mary, a loveable elderly butch figure with leather lungs and foam fingers; the demi-fan, who claims to love the game “because my dad used to watch it with me when I was a little girl”; and the actual or dissembling “puck slut,” whom the cameras pick out often, due to her penchant for blonde bouffants and tight pink sweaters.

When I decided, nobly, that CuJo had beautiful eyes (as opposed to a hot ass), I moved deeper into the mechanics of the game, stone-skipping every category of female and male affiliation.

I read a local bishop discussing Jesus in the paper a few months ago, and he said that when He beholds you, you are utterly beheld, or something like that. Critical theorists love to rattle on about “the gaze,” but in this case, I think I was transfixed in the way of the Wedding Guest, the eyes of the Mariner drawing and suspending me into his Rime.

CuJo once said in a Saturday Night puff piece that he was a shy child who learned to express himself through sports. If I had had a chance to interview him, I would have asked (after insisting he was looking at me, right at me, every time the camera picked him out) exactly what he was expressing of himself through his butterfly bends, flying leaps, and two-pad rollovers. Because it certainly was not the articulation of semi-literate golfing; rather, he expresses nuclear heat and energy, a persona his person cannot contain, off-ice or offstage.

In September of 1999, I was invited to a Leafs practice by a sports journalist friend. I had no legitimate reason to be there, so I clung to the sidelines, staring shyly at the disrobed players’ shower shoes and smelling the perfume of their rank uniforms.

When I was in the changing room, CuJo appeared, dressed exactly like me, all in black, and looking attractive and composed. I felt nothing, seeing him, other than a slight chill when he sat down and began signing photographs like an automaton. Prior to that, however, while cruising the corridors, I had glanced down the rink aisle and saw him crab-walking toward me in full uniform. I fairly swooned. It was on that day that I realized the superhero element of my fetish: I recalled that as a child I had had a painful crush on Spiderman but found Peter Parker repulsively bland and straight. Uniforms or costumes, particularly to women (or gay men), are erotic because they both conceal and reveal something intangible, even epicene, about their wearer. They signal power, and how fluid power is; in my own converse case, by dying my hair and dressing in tight sweaters, for example, I could perform the kind of sexuality that might get me a pass to the deeper recesses of the changing room (the showers).

Once I loved him, I was just like any fan, no matter how much theory I expended, no matter that I felt that our eyes, when locked through the television monitor, could produce a syncretic energy capable of winning games and wrapping the goal posts in psychic plexiglas.

I contacted his management; I called in every favour I could think of, trying to bring myself closer to something I now realize is better and brighter, like a genuine star, at a vast distance.

I logged onto his website and read innumerable wan letters from fans who believed he would write back: many of these fans were children wanting to learn how to better use their blockers or gloves: it seemed unlikely he ever read a single word. He does, however, use this site to sell what you called “Beanie Babies,” authorized, cheap little plush dogs bearing his signature for the low low price of $65.00.

Looking back, like Frederick Exley, I never wanted merely to be a woman “among many, a fan”: I wanted something that is quintessentially teenage, and is not; to look at someone and see him looking back.

Teenage girls need the torturous factor of distance in their longings: it is a better and safer way to view the train wreck of their own molten feelings. As an adult, I decided to walk through the wreckage, and attempt to wrest something away.

I was never able to reach him, as you well know, which had surprisingly few consequences regarding my love of the game: I had already been safely ferried to the ice and once there, the game, as true fans know, is bigger than the sum of its parts.

So, Paul, this is a circuitous answer to your question: now that CuJo is out of the playoffs, I still love him, but with the kind of maternal love I feel for men I have outgrown, who have outgrown me.

I logged onto the website today, and saw that he had finally answered his fans’ letters, with sweet little bromides about enjoying the game and having fun. I felt a little teary-eyed, I confess, with pride. And not the pride that once raged in my eyes, after he squashed my perverse hopes and lateral dreams (CuJo carving my initials on his helmet after a night drinking scorpions in a dark Tiki bar; reading my poems with trembling hands and heart; smiting his eyes in a fit of passion and handing them to me, transmogrified: two azure doves).

I was once, like the boy in the throes of simony in Joyce’s “Araby,” “a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

Yet, as the Devils pounded him, and each Leaf into submission, I wished for better things, as one does, after falling stars.

All the best,

Lynn