Buying Secrets from the Past: NHL Action Players

I spend a lot of time digging into my memories. I look at pictures of me as a boy – fishing on the dock, beside the Christmas Tree, with our dog Celeste – trying to access that momentous time. I have also tried to searched out childhood things like Checkerboard Ice Cream and Pantry cookies, both of which I cherished in those days and both of which have vanished.

Modern-Day Checkerboard Ice Cream but not my brand (Not the Gluten-free notation!)

It seems somehow possible that if I could just taste them again, I would rediscover a key note to my uncluttered mind, like the magic of holding the tin or the feeling of my bare legs against the kitchen linoleum. But I have not been able to find either.

Something I have found is the NHL Action Players Book from Loblaws grocery store.

Toronto Maple Leafs page of Loblaws NHL Action Players

I collected these stickers from the Loblaws grocery store, furiously opening strip after strip to fill the booklet, trading for missing stamps, finding out who had found the un-find-able ones. There were dozens of Larry Carriere and Walt McKechnie and so few of Guy Lambert and Don Awry. It was impossible to find those.

NHL Action Players available for purchase on Ebay.

And then Doug Crosby, a rich and somewhat simple boy in my class, bought the completed book from Edward Etchells for $50. The class bully Andy McAlpine mocked him. “You idiot! That’s not how it’s done!”

Class bully Andy McAlpine today.

I realize that the whole thing was about the experience of collecting things, but why not do it Doug Crosby’s way? Why go through all of the hassle of bartering for the rare stickers when you could just buy the whole thing in one shot? As much as Doug seemed to have missed the point, Andy totally misses it. It’s not about scamming the system but learning from the experiences of the thing, be that finding Don Awry or eating Checkerboard Ice Cream.

Writing Process: Tapping the Id

I am not one for dream scenes with the character lost in their heads; this is the part of the story where I lose complete interest. That’s not to say that these images aren’t a wellspring of inspiration, the pure of the id as it were, that can be woven into the narrative, like John Savage fear-grunting in The Deerhunter or Tanner Mayes clinging to her necklace.

What makes a story isn’t the arc, conflict and resolution but how it accesses what it means to be conscious. The western world seems bent on burying all of that fine stuff just to fill our pockets with more things and regret.

I didn’t dream of beer but of eating Checkerboard ice cream, spilling it all over, and I was jealous of that person and dreamed myself back to my old university where I was living on my own, shitting in the sink, not even closing the door.

I love the mania of getting into this, slopping through these base things, finding what might be next, making clouds so that I might escape into a tiny convoluted body and fly again. None of this has happened, but I think that it might. It’s about knowing that unknowable thing within.